THOUGHTS ABOUT THE TASKS OF
THE FUTURE
by Gregor Strasser
This extract has been
regarded as one of Gregor Strasser's most comprehensive ideological statements.
Here we learn how true Fascism must involve the overthrow of the profit-motive,
and why military service can help in the selection of a new elite.
Lying on a sickbed for a few weeks and months does have its good side. There
is so much, in the trivialities of everyday life, that does not get a hearing;
and now it has the chance to rise slowly from the unconscious to the conscious
mind, where it is tested and is given wings by the imagination, so that it
acquires form and gains life. In general, people often make the mistake of
assuming that practical action - the incessant preoccupation with daily
necessities - is not founded in the mind. They therefore like to set up an
invidious comparison between the thinker and the doer! It is true that the
currents of the mind and the soul do not become conscious when one is
resolutely grappling with the tasks of the day and trying, by freshly setting
to work, to solve all questions in a practical way!
So it is a comfort every now and then to have the leisure to look beyond
the tasks of the day, and of the near future, and to plumb the depths of the
questions toward whose solution we are resolutely dedicating our life's work. When
would be a better time than this, during the many lonely hours of the sickbed,
when the hands of the clock seem to stand still and the night never to end -
until it becomes finally, finally morning again! This new dawn, the fact that
again and again the dawn comes, is the deep consolation, is the blessed
certainty which makes the night of the present bearable for us-and even if the
hours, years, never seem to end - the dawn does come, my friends, and with the
sun comes, the light!
Such thoughts of the lonely nights, thoughts about the Fascist tasks of
the future - I will briefly survey them here - such thoughts have surely
occurred to most of our comrades in similar hours and in a similar way -
thoughts which at the moment are not yet the subject of our work, but whose
undercurrents are flowing, whose blood runs through our work.
The Spirit of the Economy
We Fascists, are enemies - mortal enemies - of the present capitalist economic
system with its exploitation of the economically weak, with its injustice in
wages, with its immoral evaluation of individuals according to wealth and money
instead of responsibility and achievement, and we are determined under all
circumstances to abolish this system! And with my inclination to practical
action it seems obvious to me that we have to put a better, more just, more
moral system in its place, one which, as it were, has arms and legs and better
arms and legs than the present one!
And yet it is not enough to change a system, to replace one economic
system by another - necessary above all is a change of spirit! The spirit which
is to be overcome is the spirit of materialism! We must achieve an entirely new
kind of economic thinking, a kind of thinking which frees itself from the
present conceptions rooted in money, in property, in profit and false success! It
is an indication of the Marxist, the false Socialism, that its way of thinking
is exactly that of capitalism. For this reason I have said for years that the
two form a spiritual unity, only with reversed signals! Fascism, which stems
from organic life itself, casts aside the mendacious words of a theory remote
from the world, as well as the dead ideas of a declining civilization!
We have to learn that in the economy of a people it is not profit, not
gain, which are important - but only satisfying the needs of the members of
this people! This and nothing else is the task of a "national
economics!" We have to learn that the ideas "world trade"
"balance of trade" - "export surplus" are ideas of a
declining epoch which have in the end reduced themselves ad absurdum, because
they violate the eternal law of organic life and were born out of speculation,
not out of necessity, not out of the soil! We have to learn that it is a
betrayal when speculative production, with all its means of touting and
advertising, creates an artificial need, a betrayal of human labor, of human
life! For artificially stimulated covetousness creates ever-increasing
aspirations, and increased aspirations double human slavery, which is slavery
of the mind, which instead of the soul has taken up mastery over life! What do
people know today about life?! They run around and tire themselves out, torment
themselves, strive and drudge like galley slaves- in order to lead a life of
horrifying emptiness! It is not that this new economic system which we want
produces more. What is at stake is certainly not higher production, which
Marxism demands, but the human soul! And production and economy have only one
task: to meet the economic needs of individuals - rejecting the goods which owe
their demand only to artificial stimulation, and, rejecting also the prodding
of "profit and gain"!
We have to learn that work is more than property! achievement more than
dividends! It is the most unfortunate heritage of this capitalist economic
system that all things are evaluated according to money, according to wealth,
and property! The decline of a people is the inevitable result of the
application of this standard, since selection according to property is the
mortal enemy of higher human values and of life! We have never left a doubt
that Fascism breaks this prerogative of the owner and that the liberation of
the worker shall also extend to sharing profit, sharing property, and sharing
achievement! But it would mean measuring again with the old standards if one
left it at that, and did not stress that revolution of the spirit is an
ideology which pits us against the spirit of the present system! We consciously
oppose valuation according to property with valuation according to achievement.
This is the only valuation which we recognize! We consciously place work higher
than property! We focus on achievement, not dividends, and we recognize
responsibility, not riches or splendor, as the crowning of human striving. That
is a new world-view, a new religion of the corporate state and economics. It establishes
with certainty that the horrid rule of the golden calf is at an end, and that
the difference among individuals and the differences among rights - are
differences in achievement, differences in degree of responsibility,
differences which come from God and which are sacred!
The Spirit of Society and of the State
And just as our fight against the form of the capitalist economy is at the same
time a fight against the spirit of this capitalist economy, which must be
rooted out in its outward expression and in the heart of every individual; so
our fight against the form of society and of the present state is also a life
or death struggle against the spirit of this society, this state: Againts
liberalism and this false democracy!
The spirit of our Fascist idea has to overpower the spirit of liberalism
and false democracy if there is to be a Fascist state at all! Deeply rooted in
organic life, we have realized that the false belief in the equality of man is
the deadly threat with which liberalism destroyed people and nation, culture
and morals, violating the deepest levels of our being! Liberal thinking gnaws
at the basis of life itself, destroys the blood, destroys the sacred order
which is based on the distance which is created by inequality and which has
nothing in common with the present social structure! For hierarchy, of which I
am speaking here, depends exclusively on the achievements of the individual for
the community. We have to reject with fanatical zeal the frequent lie that
people are "basically equal" and equal in regard to their influence
in the state and their share of power! People are unequal, they are unequal
from birth, become more unequal in life and are therefore to be valued
unequally in their positions in society and in the state! But this inequality
in turn has only one standard, can and must have only this one standard: the
achievement of the individual for society, for the nation, for the state!!
And thus I reach a demand which at first glance may seem utopian, but
which results inevitably from what I have said, and which has occurred to
various friends in a similar way. The demand for unequal distribution of rights
according to achievement for the state requires the elaboration of a process of
selection according to which such achievements are to be measured. In the
Fascist Movement there is much talk about the emergence of a new group of
leaders, and this demand touches what I said. But the ways which are
recommended for a solution: these genetic tests, indoctrination, and so forth,
and so forth, appear to my practical mind somewhat dubious as to possibility,
value and even effect! Another way, however, a thoroughly fair, military way of
which my friend Pfeffer reminded me on one occasion, is suited as no other:
selection by the army!
This requires that military service be voluntary, a right and not a
duty! The practical way would be that by law every citizen would have to serve
the state for two years; during this time he would not, as the supporters of a
compulsory period of labor service want, build roads or do other mass work, but
would learn a trade, so that there would not be a single citizen who had not
had at least a two-year training in a trade! The selection of the best,
however, would be reserved to the trade of arms, which would last for four
years and therefore attract only those most willing to sacrifice and which
would bring with it the mortal danger of war and therefore demand all the
heroic virtues! Entrance is voluntary and not dependent on any force. Who
doubts that those citizens who voluntarily apply for the army, which removes
them from private life twice as long as the civil service, which further does
not, like the latter, include practical advantages for practical life, but on
the contrary, after an infinitely more severe service, means danger to life in
war - who doubts that these citizens would be the best of their people, whose
achievements for the state now and in the future would tower high above the
average! What would be more natural than that the Fascist state value these
higher achievements above others - so much so that, in addition to the general
equal right to vote of every citizen, it would give the voluntary defenders of
this state a tenfold additional right to vote?! What is this but the recognition
of the principle of achievement as the basis for political rights?! And in
return the military profession would visibly take over the leading role in the
state, which above all is its state which it will maintain and protect against
all attacks from outside!
It would be a sin not to make the same distinction in reference to the
female sex in this connection! For since all characteristics of decay are
apparent with the same fateful intensity in both sexes, thus also the basis is
the same; I would almost like to say that experience shows it to be even
stronger among the "mothers." It would therefore be an unforgivable
oversight if the Fascist state did not look here too for the method of natural
selection which would divide the more valuable part and prefer - yes, prefer -
it to the other!
With the man military service is the most sincere, and most valuable,
form of participation in the state - with the woman motherhood!! There are
numerous warlike tribes in
Call it utopia, for me it is a certainty: 20 to 30 years of such
selection - and the nation will have a group of leeaders and lesser leaders
which changes the entire face of society and the state and which is the
unshakable support of this state and its economy!
The Spirit of Culture Is any special word still needed
to show that the false spirit of our present life too has to be overcome at the
root, in order to create something really new, something new that lasts?! It
was no longer possible to write "spirit of our present life"; that
would be too big a lie! I had not realized clearly the tragedy of this present
life until I had time to read during the long weeks. If I did not know how the
souls of men hunger, hunger and thirst, then I would have got the impression
from the books I read that the soul is finally dead and has been replaced by
reason, by "ratio," which sees meaning and purpose and content only
in the mechanical, only in the technical. There is a terrible hopelessness in
the souls of humanity, a dissolution of all firm values, an instability which
looks in vain for stability, stability which it does not find any more in
religion and which it has lost in ethics! "relativity"- that is the
keynote of the culture of our times - relativity in all things, relativity in
all knowledge, relativity in all feeling - and the numb anxiety of a bad
conscience tries in vain to cover and excuse this inner instability with "psychoanalysis"!
The core itself is eaten away and has to a great extent already been lost!
And this is the largest, perhaps also incurable wound!! For it is a
profound truth that moral recovery is the precondition for the social and
political attitude of a people. I do not want to be misunderstood in the word
morality - morality is always founded only on animate nature, not on supposedly
unalterable commands even if they were once extracted from animate nature! We
are not talking about the dogmatic concept of morality of one rank or one
religion, but about harmony - harmony between the divine in man and eternal
nature. The form [of this harmony] is bound to time as man hirnself is - but
the content is eternal!
It is difficult, especially here, to propose concrete measures which
would promote improvement. And yet my practical mind tries nevertheless to set
up general demands. The influence of the state can only be of an indirect and
rather external nature: through the schools and especially by using teachers
with a corresponding attitude. What, however, is necessary in order to change
the present spirit of disintegration, of dissolution, of aimlessness, or
relativity and dishonesty; or at least to prevent the further spreading to
those individuals or segments of the population which have stayed healthy, is,
besides giving support to all truly religious endeavors, mainly this: The
feeling of honor has to be placed in the center of the entire spiritual life! It
would be wrong to ignore the fact that, for many people, and genetically not
the worst ones, religion is no longer capable of forming this center, as it did
so splendidly in the Middle Ages. But the sense of honor, which in itself is
already a typical characteristic of a first-rate individual, is still
thoroughly able to take its place as the dominant force in the soul, to
organize man's thoughts, which have been fragmented and aware of too many
nuances, making it possible for him to find once again the "meaning of
life." It is only the second phase of the same line when I demand a strong
emphasis on duty as the political and social activation of honor. I therefore
see the "meaning of life" as the completion of human existence
through both honor and duty; this is a solution which is possible for the
citizen of today and which perhaps, for him, represents the "Fascist
style" of his fulfillment!!
For in one thing we must achieve utter clarity: that forms and
institutions are changeable, are never right "as such" and never
wrong "as such": that there is, however, only one "right"
spirit, only one spirit with a constructive viewpoint: that is the spirit of
eternal nature, animated by man, the image of God!!
It is our strong belief and our deep knowledge that this spirit is in
us, in the idea of Fascism, so that this spirit and no other will build:
The Corporate Fascist state!
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