The World War
tionalist attitude sufficiently proves the wrongness of their feelings can at once be absolutely refuted by simply pointing out that pacificistic democracy is no less insane, although its supporters come almost exclusively from the bourgeois camp. So long as millions of middle-class citizens continue reverently to worship their Jewish democratic press every morning, it ill becomes these gentry to make witticisms about the stupidity of the “comrade,” who in the end is but swallowing the same muck, though in a different guise. The manufacturer is one and the same Jew in both cases.
We must beware of denying things whose existence is a simple fact. The fact that the class question is not (as people are fond of claiming just before election) a matter of mere intellectual problems cannot be denied. The class conceit of a great part of our people, as well as the lower esteem in which the manual worker is held, is a phenomenon which does not proceed from the imagination of a lunatic.
But this quite aside, it shows the small thinking-power of our so-called intelligentsia that they suppose a condition which could not prevent the rise of such a pestilence as Marxism can now still find it possible to recover what has been lost.
The “bourgeois” party, as they describe themselves, can never attach the “proletarian” masses to their camp. These are two worlds, divided partly by nature, partly artificially, whose mutual footing can be only battle. But the younger one will be victorious—and that one is Marxism.
A war upon Social Democracy in 1914 would indeed have been conceivable; but it was doubtful, in view of the lack of any practical substitute, how long that state could have been maintained. There was a great gap here.
I was of this opinion long before the war, and could therefore never make up my mind to join one of the existing parties. In the course of the World War my opinion was further strengthened by the obvious impossibility—owing to the very lack of a movement which would be more than a “parliamentary”
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