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Jose Ortega Y Gassett, The Revolt Of The Masses
CHAPTER XIV: WHO RULES THE WORLD?
Page 44
Only the determination to construct a great nation from the group of peoples of the Continent would give new life to the pulses of Europe. She would start to believe in herself again, and automatically to make demands on, to discipline, herself. But the situation is much more difficult than is generally realised. The years are passing and there is the risk that the European will grow accustomed to the lower tone of the existence he is at present living, will get used neither to rule others nor to rule himself. In such a case, all his virtues and higher capacities would vanish into air. But, as has always happened in the process of nation-forming, the union of Europe is opposed by the conservative classes. This may well mean destruction for them, for to the general danger of Europe becoming definitely demoralised and losing all its historic strength is added another, more concrete and more imminent. When Communism triumphed in Russia, there were many who thought that the whole of the West would be submerged by the Red torrent. I did not share that view; on the contrary I wrote at the time that Russian Communism was a substance not assimilable by the European, a type that has in its history thrown all its efforts and energies in the scale of individualism. Time has passed, and the fearful ones of a while since have recovered their tranquillity. They have recovered their tranquility precisely at the moment when they might with reason lose it. Because now indeed is the time when victorious, overwhelming Communism may spread over Europe. This is how it appears to me. Now, just as before, the creed of Russian Communism does not interest or attract Europeans- offers them no tempting future. And not for the trivial reasons that the apostles of Communism- obstinate, unheeding, strangers to fact- are in the habit of alleging. The bourgeois of the West knows quite well, that even without Communism, the days are numbered of the man who lives exclusively on his income and hands it down to his children. It is not this that renders Europe immune to the Russian creed, still less is it fear. The arbitrary bases on which Sorel founded his tactics of violence twenty years ago seem to us stupid enough to-day. The bourgeois is no coward, as Sorel thought, and at the actual moment is more inclined to violence than the workers. Everybody knows that if Bolshevism triumphed in Russia, it was because there were in Russia no bourgeois.[14]Fascism, which is a petit bourgeois movement, has shown itself more violent than all the labour movement combined. It is nothing of all this then that prevents the European from flinging himself into Communism, but a much simpler reason. It is that the European does not see in the Communistic organisation an increase of human happiness.
[14]This ought to be enough to convince us once for all that Marxian Socialism and Bolshevism are two historical phenomena which have hardly a single common denominator.