I have already insisted on the untruth at the root of Marxism, namely the assertion that man is reduced to what his economic environment makes of him. I won’t come back to this. I need only emphasise the unnatural character—against the fundamental law of all manifestation—of the approach which consists in presenting a being as the product of something external to him and which, in any case, is only interested in what is in him less essential, less specifically ‘his’ metaphysically speaking, less permanent: his physical needs and comfort.
From the point of view of the universal order, such an approach would be just as absurd about the animal, or the plant, as it is concerning man. No being can be reduced to its appearance and material functions, and even less to the result of the action of the economic environment, that is to say, in the final analysis, of the possibilities of nutrition, appearance and functions. The last of the herbs derives its existence from what is permanent in the seed from which it emerged. The environment can, of course, help it to develop, or on the contrary prevent it from developing; it cannot make it become what it is not: turn a buttercup into a dandelion or vice versa any more than it can destroy what is, in the visible world and beyond, permanent in a man: his physical and psychic heredity, his race.
No one is so foolish as to deny the influence of environment on a man’s life: his occupations, the opportunities he has or doesn’t have. But to reduce the being of the latter to the ‘result of the influence of the environment’ and especially of the ‘economic’ environment and to build on this real reversal of the process of passage from essence to existence a whole political philosophy, is a reversal of the original and impersonal cosmic wisdom. It is, therefore, an anti-traditional enterprise.
If proof were needed the few words which sum up, with blinding clarity, the method and aim of the Marxists are ‘class struggle’, and ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.
Certainly, in the advanced epoch of the Dark Age, in which we have been living for a long time now, ‘classes’ have lost their meaning. They have lost their meaning insofar as they no longer correspond to castes. They represent less and less the real differences in character and aptitudes between the people who compose them, differences linked to heredity. It is therefore not at all bad, but highly desirable, that they should disappear in a total overhaul of societies—an overhaul that would tend to restore the ideal order, as far as possible. It is, for anyone who wants to oppose the general decadence which only the fanatics of ‘progress’ refuse to see all around us, especially urgent to put an end to the scandal of purchasable privileges.
This state of affairs is not new. It seems to have been established in Western Europe—in France at least—in the 16th century, with the very first acquisitions of titles of nobility for money. It was sanctioned, and reinforced, by the Revolution of 1789, made in part by the people, but for the benefit of the bourgeoisie and under its direction: a Revolution whose result was to substitute, for the power emanating from birth alone, the power granted by money alone.
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Editor’s Note: This is extremely important! See this post that is already eight years old on this site.
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Nothing could be more urgent than to change this. It is not that the rich are condemnable in themselves because they have become rich, or because their rich fathers have passed on a fortune to them. It is by no means so, provided, of course, that their money hasn’t been acquired through the exploitation of misery or vice, at the expense of the community. But he becomes one as soon as he imagines that this money gives him rights other than those which derive from the qualities and capacities inherited with his blood, and therefore inherent in his very being. He becomes one if he imagines that he can legitimately buy everything with this money, including the responsibility of command and the obedience of his compatriots.
In a word, there is no need to ‘fight’, let alone suppress, the bourgeoisie, or the aristocracy, or the working or peasant class. All have their raison d’être and their role. It is only necessary to ensure that every man is truly in his place, and remains there.
From the point of view of this ideal order, which reflects and symbolises the intangible hierarchy of the states of Being from the point of view of the eternal, the idea of ‘class struggle’ having political power is nonsense. Power should be in the hands of the best, the aristoi, those worthy and capable of exercising it. And if the fact of losing it always reveals some lack or failure, or even, sometimes, some deep indignity in the one who has it snatched from him, it doesn’t follow that it is enough to usurp it to become worthy of it.
The ‘class struggle’ is only conceivable at a time when these ‘classes’ are no longer distinguishable from each other, except by what they possess, and not by what they are. It is, in other words, only conceivable when it is property alone, or property above all, which determines the factitious ‘being’ of each class instead of the true being of the class, that is, the physical and psychic heredity of its members which determines what they are entitled to possess; when, I repeat, the ‘classes’ no longer correspond to the respective castes.
‘Struggle’, ‘combat’—I shall come back to this later in connection with anything other than Marxism—then becomes the only means of establishing a certain order in a society that no longer has any connection with eternal principles. There is necessarily violence or struggle when these principles are disregarded in the visible world. This has been the case since the end of the age of truth.[1] This is the meaning given to this struggle, for or against the ideal order, that ultimately justifies or condemns it.
Now, for Marxists, it must lead to what they call the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, in other words, to the passage of power into the hands of the masses: that is to say, of the people who are the least qualified to exercise it. It therefore tends towards a complete overthrow of the social hierarchy as it was in all the periods when it reflected, even from a distance, the eternal order. This alone should suffice to characterise Marxism as a backwards philosophy. Its effort to eradicate the existing elites and to reduce the masses themselves to the state of a human ragbag which is increasingly easy to ‘condition’ and guide in the direction of exclusively economic production, is a seemingly a diabolical undertaking.
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[1] The Satya Yuga of the Sanskrit scriptures.