1932 Gottfried Feder

THE INDUSTRIAL CAPITAL OF ALL OF
GERMAN INDUSTRY AMOUNTS TO
LESS THAN 12 BILLION !

Understand this clearly !  “In all areas, in our iron and coal industry, clothing and textiles, stone and earth, mining and shipping, wood and glass, in our construction industry, in the gigantic chemical factories, in our formerly internationally dominant electrical industry, in our machine and locomotive factories, dockyards and paper factories, transportation and food industries ;  short and sweet, in the infinitely broad area of all our industries—again, all our industries—we find not even 12 billion !”  Reckoned on the basis of the splendid situation before the war !  But even at that time

THE HOUSE OF ROTHSCHILD ALONE POSSESSED

40 BILLION ! 

And what might it possess today after the gigantic interest that the war brought its way !  You could gather together all the farmers of the entire world and their total cash assets would not approach the 40 billion of the one family of Rothschilds. 

But we have a great number of such “Rothschilds.”  The Mendelssohns, the Bleichröders, the Friedländers, the Warburgs, to name only a few of the most important.  And even if none of these equals its gigantic model each has more money to waste than all our outspoken farmers together !  Yet in spite of this it is precisely the landowners whom our “saviors of the people” brand as the worst, even the only, exploiters, while the true vampire is never mentioned even in a whisper.  We are intentionally diverted to the far lesser evil so that we will not see the greatest evil, all-consuming loan capital .  And this is the way it’s been done from Marx and Lassalle up to Levien, Landauer and Mühsam .  Haven’t you opened your eyes yet ? ...

In “The Social State,” first published in Auf Gut Deutsch, on May 24, 1919, Feder joins Eckart’s call for a new and better revolution .  He demands the overthrow of domination by “the golden international,” which he associates with the Entente powers, and proposes the establishment of a form of government which is democratic, highly centralized, and corporatist .  His explanations of how this new government will work are rather vague, but one senses that this is quite unintentional and results from the author’s naïvité .  It is the corporatist sections of this document which are most notable, since they lay the basis for future Nazi corporatist proposals .

The Social State

Gottfried Feder

The old form of government has broken down .  What shall take its place ?  This is the most important problem of the future :  Weimar’s democratic-parliamentary monster, lifeless as it is, now that its illusionary policies have completely collapsed, seems to have reached the end of its days .  The peace conditions of the Entente are the horrible alarm bell which has dispelled Socialist dreams and illusions .  Where is Mr. Scheidemann’s peace with understanding ?  Where is Mr. Erzberger’s economic peace—guaranteed to be ready in half an hour (!)  Where is the League of Nations, where is Mr. Eisner’s world revolution ?  Where is the workers’ state in which production is doubled; where is the higher morality — where is any reconstruction at all to be seen ?

Weighed and found wanting—that is already the judgement of its own people, of its own contemporaries .  Over and over again history will curse the German revolutionaries who betrayed their people, who in their shortsighted megalomania first robbed a brave people of belief in and desire for victory and then with the cowardly bravery of the assassin stabbed the army in the back during its most difficult days, in order to seize the power which they cannot use .  For it is one thing to fell a swaying giant from behind to uproot a dynasty which has already lost touch with the people, or to revolutionize a civil service which has lost its vital connection with the life of the people .  It is quite a different thing to display revolutionary power when the task is to inspire the mortally wounded people with new vitality and to prepare a new and vigorous political organism .  Where is the revolutionary power of the German revolutionaries ?  Where is the French, the English, the Italian revolution ?  Where is the world revolution ?  Messrs.  Ebert, Scheidemann, Erzberger, Eisner, Hoffman and whatever all their names are have kept none of their promises, none whatsoever .  Why ?  Because no new idea of state guides them, because they think the new form of government should be, at best, class rule, or worse :  a system of parliamentary compromises ;  because they are so far from the true socialist state that they cannot summon the courage to lay a hand on the capitalist system; because they have not yet understood what the World War was really all about, namely, that it was the final battle of the international monetary powers for ultimate world domination .

It would be best to ask ourselves which of the chief defects of the old state we should avoid I will enumerate them :

The irresponsible (assertion of) divine right by the Crown ;  the tact that army and navy as well as the higher civil service were dependent on the sovereign ruler .  Further, the wholly insufficient representation of the people in the parliament which, completely tangled up in disgusting party quarrels, lost any sense of the interests of the folk; a social democracy which seemed to find its life work exclusively in inciting the workers against their employers .  These were probably the most prominent defects in the political life of our people before the collapse .  It is, therefore, our most important task to avoid these defects .  The revolution has made a clean sweep of the obvious abuses of the old form of government—the irresponsible assertion of divine right, the exaggerated and misdirected militarism and bureaucracy .  But the much more deeply imbedded defect, the whole hopeless parliamentarianism, is growing vigorously and is beginning, if the signs are not deceptive, to reach an understanding with the forces of capitalism .  Obviously, the only deeper meaning of the revolution, that is, the emancipation of labor from international economic enslavement by the golden international, would thus be abolished and the economic subjugation of creative labor by the interest slavery of the mammonistic powers would be firmly established .

The new state must therefore make a radical break with all the principles of western democracy .  It must especially break with parliamentary parties and parliamentary cliques, and above all, it must not mix political and economic types of popular representation in a single parliament, but must provide for this basic separation by a two-chamber system .  The House of the People (as the first chamber) represents the political interests of the whole people, while the Central Council must represent the economic interests of the working population . 

The most important thing in the reorganization is a wholly different electoral system, erected on new foundations, which will be explained below .