own in _Things that are to
Come_,[1] be closely approached by a suitable policy in regard to
property and education; above all, by a limitation of the right of
inheritance. Of socialization in the strict sense there is, for this
purpose, no need. Yet a far-reaching policy of socialization--and I do
not here refer to a mere mechanical nationalization of the means of
production but to a radical economic and social resettlement--is
necessary and urgent, because it awakens and trains responsibilities,
and because it withdraws from the sluggish hands of the governing
classes the determination of time and of method, and places it in the
hands that have a better title, those of the whole commonalty, which,
at present, stands helpless through sheer democracy. For only in the
hands of a political people does democracy mean the rule of the
people; in those of an untrained and unpolitical people it becomes
merely an affair of debating societies and philistine chatter at the
inn ordinary. The symbol of German bourgeois democracy is the tavern;
thence enlightenment is spread and there judgments are formed; it is
the meeting place of political associations, the forum of their
orators, the polling-booth for elections.

But the sign that this far-reaching socialization has been actually
carried out is the cessation of all income without work. I say the
sign, but not the sole postulate; for we must postulate a complete and
genuine democratization of the State and public economy, and a system
of education equally accessible to all: only then can we say that the
monopoly of class and culture has been smashed. But the cessation of
the workless income will show the downfall of the last of
class-monopolies, that of the Plutocracy.

It is not very easy to imagine what society will be like when these
objects have been realised, at least if we are thinking not of a brief
period like the present Russian regime, or a passing phase as in
Hungary, but an enduring and stationary condition. A dictatorial
oligarchy, like that of the Bolshevists, does not come into
consideration here, and the well-meaning Utopias of social romances
crumble to nothing. They rest, one and all, on the blissfully ignorant
assumption of a state of popular well-being exaggerated tenfold beyond
all possibility.

The knowledge of the sort of social condition towards which at present
we Germans, and then Europe, and finally the other nations are tending
in this vertical Mig