9 THE MASSES AND THE STATE

When groups of settlers got lost in the American backwoods, they tried to find the path on which they had come in order once again to push forward into unknown terrain from known terrain. They did not form political parties to do this, nor did they engage in endless disputes about the unknown terrain. They did not knock one another’s heads off or ceaselessly bother one another to draft a programme on settlements. They acted in a natural work-democratic way on the basis of the given situation. They made a united effort to regain known terrain and then made a fresh effort to push on from there.

When a vegetotherapist loses himself in a maze of irrational reactions while treating a patient, he does not begin to argue with his patient on the’ existence or non-existence of God’. He does not become neurotic and irrational, but reviews the situation and attempts to form a lucid picture of the previous course of the treatment. He goes back to the last point of development at which he was still clear about the course of the treatment.

Every living creature will naturally attempt to discover and eliminate the cause of a catastrophe in which it finds itself involved. It will not repeat actions that brought about the catastrophe in the first place. This is how difficulties are surmounted by experience. Our politicians are far removed from such natural reactions. It would not be farfetched to say that it is in the nature of a politician that he does not learn anything from experience. The Austrian monarchy triggered the First World War in 1914. At that time, it fought against American democrats with weapons in its hands. In 1942, during the Second World War, it entered a claim, which was backed by American diplomats, to re-establish the Habsburg dynasty ‘to avert’ new wars. This is irrational political nonsense.

In the First World War ‘the Italians’ were the friends and allies of the Americans. In 1942, during the Second World War, they were arch enemies, and in 1943, friends again. In the First World War, 1914, ‘the Italians’ were the arch enemies of ‘the Germans’, ‘hereditary enemies’ from way back, as it were. In the Second World War, 1940, ‘the Italians’ and ‘the Germans’ were blood brothers, ‘again on grounds of heredity’. In the next world war, let’s say in 1963, ‘the Germans’ and ‘the French’ will have switched from ‘racial hereditary enemies’ to ‘racial hereditary friends’.

This is the emotional plague. It’s something like this: A Copernicus comes along in the sixteenth century and asserts that the earth revolves around the sun; in the seventeenth century one of his pupils comes along and asserts that the earth does not revolve around the sun, and in the eighteenth century this man’s pupil again asserts that it does revolve around the sun. In the twentieth century, however, the astronomers assert that both Copernicus and his pupils were right, for the earth revolves around the sun and remains still at the same time. When dealing with a Copernicus, we are ready with the stake. When dealing with a politician, however, a politician who tells a people that the most incredible nonsense is true, who in 1940 holds up to be true precisely the opposite of what be held up to be true in 1939, then millions of people lose all bounds and assert that a miracle has taken place.

It is a rule of good science not to put forth a new theory as long as the old theories work well. If, however, the old theories prove to be inadequate or erroneous, then one proceeds to ferret out their errors, to subject them to a critique and to develop new views

on the basis of fresh data. Such natural procedures are alien to the politician. No matter how ma’ny new facts are added to the old; no matter how many errors are exposed; the old theories continue to exist as slogans, and the new facts are concealed or passed off as illusions. The democratic formalities have disappointed millions of people in Europe, and thus opened the road to fascist dictatorship. The democratic politicians fail to go back to the starting points of democratic principles, to correct them in keeping with the radical changes that have taken place in social life and to give them a useful direction. Fresh votes are held on formalities, on precisely those formalities that were dethroned so in-gloriously in Europe.

One wants to think out and to plan a system of peace and to put it to a vote. It is clear that one shrinks back from this system even before the planning begins. The basic elements of peace and of human cooperation are physically present in man’s natural work relationships, and they provide the basis for the development of guarantees of peaceableness. They must not be ‘introduced’ — they are already there, A good physician does not ‘introduce’ a ‘new health’ into a critically sick organism. He finds out which elements of health are spontaneously present in the sick organism. When he finds them, he plays them off against the process of sickness. The same holds true for the sick social organism when one approaches it through social science and not with political programmes and ideas. It is only possible to develop the actual conditions of freedom that are present and to eliminate the obstacles that thwart this development. But this must be done organically. One cannot impose legally guaranteed freedoms on a sick social organism.

The relationship of the masses to the state can be best illustrated by using the Soviet Union as an example. The reasons for this are as follows; The groundwork for the social revolution of 1917 was prepared by a sociological theory that had been tested over a period of ten years. The Russian Revolution made use of this theory. Millions of people took part in the social upheaval, endured it, rejoiced in it and passed it on. What became of the sociological theory and of the masses in the ‘proletarian state’ in the course of twenty years?

The development of the Soviet Union cannot be ignored if one is seriously concerned with the question of democracy. What is its nature, can it be realized, and how? The difference between work-democratic mastering of difficulties on the one hand and formal democratic politicking on the other hand was very clearly shown in the attitude of the various political and economic organizations to the Soviet Union.