- Yg. 1922, No. 35 -
The more untenable the conditions become with us in Germany, the more the warning sounds: the government should. It is always the same. The own initiative one wants replaced by an order. When the need is greatest, one confers faithfully according to the old habit of those who are there, who will fix and put things right. A sprightly source of sweet laws is to flow through the arid land and conjure again the old fertility that once existed without the laws or in spite of the laws. What is today's man without government decrees and extraordinary measures? He can not imagine life without her anymore.
The misfortune, the hardship, the chaos goes fast, the laws creep. It usually takes a long time before they are fabricated by a cumbersome legislative machinery and when they are finally under a lot of compromises, they are usually such failures that no one can really enjoy them. Then they make their way first through the respective Privy Council chambers and offices, wherever rabbinic 14 implementation provisions make sure that what should still be working on them, for the benefit of the working people, goes to hell. But the subject in his blind belief in law is now waiting patiently for the good effect of the new decree, whose inconspicuous funeral is already decided upon by the individual authorities. But if he notices that the new law does not bring salvation, he demands a new law. And the government, law-abiding as it is, otherwise it would not be a government, makes new tapeworm-like laws.
The blind man, too, gradually sees that one must at last deal with the evil with other, more real means. Not after the battle cry: that's the way it goes on, after which, according to experience, everything has gone on, but out of the realization that one should not shoot for peas with elephants. In any case, when, in difficult situations, the unions attempted to impose their will on the government by any demands, the call from the auxiliary government promptly sounded. And, strangely enough, this reputation always came from that side which, along with the representative government, had always been the auxiliary government with much more powers. It is clear that this capitalist subordinate government, which is after all the main government in Germany after all, was embarrassing and dangerous in the appearance of a new subsidiary government. At such moments she was worried about the legislative apparatus, which was always so beautifully unnoticed and incidentally allowed the people to live on in their illusions. Namely, that laws can make a fundamental difference and prevent the realization that only the form of serfdom changes and nothing else.
The big groupings of powerful economic organizations are now more real powers than the state, they make the legislation in some respects illusory by their economic monopoly position. The government simply lacks the power to make the People's State, built up with such honest will, into an actual national community in which interest-rate bondage and capitalism are no longer possible. The government should act against usury, but the almighty cartels can calmly exercise their price dictatorship. The government should bring about a recovery of our national body, but it is not powerful enough to prevent industry from ceasing its business conduct in the direction of promoting the German general economy, but merely proceeding from the point of view of earning and expanding its own power. The dictatorship of capital, industry and land ownership can not be created by regulations from the world. These forces are too real. One can only contrast them with an equivalent power, that is the power of the consumer over that of the producer. The power of capital labor and the even greater: the consensus of consumers.
The realization must finally say: not the government should, but I should, I can, I must. Complaining and waiting for rescue ordinances must finally yield to a purposeful procedure that undermines an exploitative system at its roots. Why complain about the exploitation of the traders and demand a law against it, if you have it in your hands at any moment, just can not exploit and be over-advantaged? Why should not so many thousands of consumers be able to take the purchasing of their goods into their own hands, and why should not it be possible, with a little initiative, to gain a certain degree of consumer and cooperative movement? that you cover all the needs of the cooperative and not just a tiny percentage?
Only here would the real struggle begin between capital and labor, between exploiter and consumer. The huge economic power factors of the consumer co-operatives could break the sole rule of the big capitalist economic organizations and so much more effectively achieve what is being striven for today through legislation from above. The delusional delusion of the subject must give way to the free initiative of all socially minded people who want to come to a new state of society not from the ordinance, but from the convictions. If liberation takes place in this way, then the danger is overcome that what one strives for as socialism becomes a powerful bureaucratic waterhead with a hierarchy of officials, instead of an organically structured social order founded on the freest possible basis. Then people will also come more and more from the “government should” of the state helot, who is in charge of paragraphs, to a true inner freedom that hopes nothing from ordinances and laws, but everything from himself as a free, independent person.
1922, 35 Hermann Mauthe