97. On the Current Economic Situation

At this moment, nothing can be achieved with mere abstract programs. What matters is to address the instincts of the masses, which assert themselves with elemental force, and to organize through their honest and truthful shaping that which the bourgeoisie, in the time when it was the leading section of the population, neglected to organize. But action in this direction can now, at this moment, only be based on personal thought and action that directly encompasses the individual concrete situations. Above all, it requires an understanding of what lives in the masses. The classes that have been leading up to now have neglected everything in order to gain this understanding. They have missed every opportunity to interact with the proletarian classes at the moment when they awaken to self-awareness of their personalities. And as long as there is still a belief in the bourgeoisie that one can do something in the necessary development if one takes one's ideas of social order according to the way of thinking of the previously valid education and science, then one will only drive into the destruction. Socialists have these ideas drummed into them by bourgeois science, literature and the press. They swear by everything they have inherited intellectually from the old ruling classes, as if it were infallible. They just draw different conclusions from these ideas than the bourgeoisie. Only by speaking a completely new language can anything be achieved. For the time being, the continuity of economic life must be assured by the leading personalities in the economic bodies not excluding themselves by their lack of understanding from the councils that are being formed, for example in education, but, insofar as they are inclined to speak the language of the new era, including themselves in it. No one who is a leader in economic life need do anything other than voluntarily place himself within the proletarian formations in the position to which his insights into economic management will easily lead him if he has an understanding of the instincts of the masses. But he must not believe that this understanding will come to him “by itself.” The proletariat has, over decades, absorbed ideas about capital, wages, surplus value, class struggle, and materialist historiography. Many a proletarian today knows more about these things than a university economist, or especially than a statesman. While the proletarians were absorbing these things in their evening meetings, the bourgeoisie were playing cards, reading newspapers or watching “entertaining” theater performances. The proletarian knows this. That is why it is difficult to gain his trust. Of course, he will not simply accept the bourgeois into the order he wants to establish when they declare themselves ready to sit with him. They have to behave in such a way that he can see they will be useful to him. They do not have to conform to him, but they have to apply their knowledge and skills, and they have to decide to engage with the way of thinking that he has about entrepreneurial profit, rent and wages. The proletarian wants to paralyze the harmful characteristics of these three types of economic values for his understanding by socializing all means of production. It is necessary to show him how these three types of values can function in the economic process so that entrepreneurial profit never goes to a private sector, rent never flows into an economic channel other than that of intellectual life and support for the disabled, and wages can never be less than the proceeds of labor – less the entrepreneurial share that does not flow into the private sector and the necessary rent share as defined above. By communicating with the proletariat about these things, one must at the same time achieve an understanding of the radical reorganization of the entire educational system. It is necessary to create an understanding of the necessity for this revolution to precede the building of a new economic life. And one must know how to secure the free individuality of movement in this area. To do this, it is necessary that all educational monopolies come to an end and that in the field of intellectual life, completely free private mobility and competition enter into their full possibilities. Free competition and private freedom in the intellectual field can only be realized under the coming conditions if the intellectual sphere remains within its own field and does not, for example, by the use and exploitation of entrepreneurial profit or rent, want to put the intellectual sphere in the service of the material, especially in the service of financial speculation. —