Spengler and the Peasantry - Maxima-Minima

"First of all, the word "worker" must be re-conceived, it must be recognized in and behind it the mutation that many 19th-century concepts and institutions suffer - a transformation that resembles the unfolding of the imago from the chrysalis.

However, it is much easier to communicate a new thought to a thinking person than the view of an image that is surprising. He sees the same thing, but not in the same way. This also applies to heads of Oswald Spengler's rank, as I learned from a letter of 25 September 1932, which has since been published in his correspondence. In it he judged the "worker" from the anti-Marxist, i.e. from an outdated, location by referring specifically to the peasant and his future. That was probably more than a generational question. It is a difference from the very beginning whether one sees ideas or figures. The thirty years that have elapsed since the book was published have sufficiently taught me that.

The reference to the farmer made me think insofar as it contradicted Spengler's system and its main features. Any imperialist must, for better or worse, resign himself to the sacrifice of the peasantry. World power is realized at its expense, as it was experienced in Rome and England and today not only in Russia, but also, in accordance with the development of the world state, in the remotest corners of the earth, in every yard and every native hut, on every plough and every horse.

This raises the intermediate question of who, in the case of the world state, should do the rough work? By its very nature, there can be neither colonies nor exploitation of conquered granaries, nor the difference between "white" and "colored" labor - all those profits that highly developed states since antiquity draw from the harvests and products of conquered territories thanks to their technical, military, and political superiority: Advantages from poorly paid or unpaid work in a word. Political and moral, technical and economic systems meet in this question; it will continue to occupy not only the spirits but also the will beyond the rest of the century. The American War of Secession may be regarded as a model for the relations that developed from it - this makes the studies instructive, almost inevitable in a way similar to that of the Dreyfus affair, which is indispensable for assessing the imponderable within modern democracy.

That the question of the shifting of slave labour will be solved in a technical way, quantitatively through the development of robots and automatons, qualitatively through the refinement and transformation of raw products in a way whose purpose and extent are still hardly to be guessed at - this must be understood as one of the possible achievements among many, not as an intention, but as one of the means of the forming world. It belongs to the inheritance, to the dowry of the worker's figure. The aim of technology is the spiritualization of the earth.

The reduction of the peasantry is the most perceptible expression for the fact that the ancestral Nomos, the established race, are put at risk. Every spatial extension of the breed is a drain on it, as can be seen step by step in the course of Roman history.

Within the working world not only mechanics, but also chemistry will contribute to this reduction in an undreamt-of way - soils will no longer be developed, but earth par excellence.

The war losses, even those of Cannae, are less significant than the dilution on the one hand by expansion, and on the other by the influx of the alien. The defeated do not only bring with them their labour, they also bring with them their idiosyncrasies, their customs, their cults and their luxury. The slaves have an iron forehead; they observe sharply and are difficult to see through.

Whoever conquers is conquered himself - the Macedonians suspected this at Alexander's wedding to Roxane, in which he also celebrated the fusion of Europe with Asia."