The Intellectual Class and Valuing Manual Labor

Our intellectual class, particularly in Germany, is so shut up in itself and fossilized that it lacks living contact with the classes beneath it. Two evil consequences result from this:

1. The intellectual class neither understands nor sympathizes with the broad masses.

It has been so long cut off from them that it does not have the necessary psychological ties to understand them. It has become estranged from the people.

2. The intellectual class lacks the necessary willpower.

Willpower is always weaker in cultivated circles, which live in seclusion, than among the primitive masses.

We Germans have never been lacking in abundant scientific culture. But we have always had a lack of willpower and the capacity for making decisions.

For example, the more ‘intellectual’ our statesmen have been, the more lacking they have been in practical achievement.

Our political preparation and our technical equipment for the World War were defective because the men who directed our public affairs were overeducated. They were overflowing with knowledge and intelligence, yet without any sound instinct, energy, or any spirit of daring.

Our nation had to fight for its existence under a Chancellor who was a dillydallying philosopher.

If instead of a Bethmann von Hollweg, we had had a rough man of the people as our leader, the heroic blood of the common grenadier would not have been shed in vain.

The exaggeratedly intellectual leaders were the best ally of the scoundrels who carried out the November revolution.

These intellectuals safeguarded the national wealth in a miserly fashion, instead of launching it forth and risking it. This led to the success of our enemy.

Here the Catholic Church presents an instructive example. Clerical celibacy forces the Church to recruit its priests not from their own ranks but progressively from the masses.

But that recruitmen provides the inexhaustible vigour of the Church. It lets the Church:

• maintain contact with the masses
• draw upon that fund of energy in the popular masses.

This is the cause of that gigantic organism’s surprising:

• youthfulness
• mental flexibility
• iron will-power.

The educational system of the Peoples’ State will furnish the the existing intellectual class with a constant supply of fresh blood from beneath.

From this bulk, the State must:

• sift out with careful scrutiny those persons who have natural talents
• see that they are employed in the service of the community.

The State itself should not furnish the revenues for members of a special class. Instead, it should fulfill the tasks allotted to them.

This will be possible, however, only if the State trains individuals specially for these offices.

Such individuals must have the necessary fundamental capabilities and willpower.

The principle does not hold true only in regard to the civil service but also in regard to all those who are to take part in the intellectual and moral leadership of the people, no matter in what sphere they may be employed.

The greatness of a people is partly dependent on the condition that it must succeed in training the best brains for those branches of the public service for which they show a special natural aptitude and in placing them in the offices where they can do their best work for the good of the community.

If two nations of equal strength and quality fight each other, then:

• the winner will be the one that has entrusted its intellectual and moral leadership to its best talents
• the loser will be the one led by privileged groups or classes and where the inner talents of its individual members are not availed of.

Such a reform seems impossible today.

It might be too much to expect from the favourite son of a highly-placed civil servant to work diligently simply because a poorer candidate might be more capable for a job.

That argument is valid as long as manual work is looked upon as it is looked upon today.

Hence the Peoples’ State will have to appreciate manual labour.

If necessary, its educational system will abolish the present-day stupid habit of looking down on physical labour as shameful.

The individual will have to be valued, not by the class of work he does but by:

• the way he does it
• its usefulness to the community.

This statement may sound monstrous in an epoch when the most brainless newspaper columnist is more esteemed than the most expert mechanic, merely because the former pushes a pen.

But this false valuation does not correspond to the nature of things.

It has been artificially introduced, arising from our materialistic epoch. There was a time when it did not exist at all.

The Material Versus the Ideal

Fundamentally, every kind of work has a double value:

• the material
• the ideal.

The material value depends on the practical importance of the work to the life of the community.

The more the persons who benefit from the work, the higher will be its material value. This value is expressed in the material recompense which the individual receives for his labour.

The ideal value on the other hand is judged by how it answers a necessity.

The material utility of an invention may be greater than that of the service rendered by an everyday workman.

But the community needs each of those small daily services just as much as the greater services.

From the material point of view, a distinction can be made in the evaluation of different kinds of work according to their utility to the community.

• This distinction is expressed by the differentiation in the scale of recompense.

But on the ideal or abstract plans, all workmen become equal the moment each strives to do his best in his own field, no matter what that field may be.

• It is on this that a man’s value must be estimated, and not on the amount of recompense received.

In a reasonably directed State care must be taken that each individual is given the kind of work which corresponds to his capabilities.

People will be trained for the positions indicated by their natural endowments. These endowments or faculties are innate and cannot be acquired by any amount of training, being a gift from Nature and not merited by men.

Therefore, men should not be measured according to the kind of work that they do. This is because that work has been assigned to them.

He should be judged by how he performs the work entrusted to him by the community.

For the work which the individual performs is not the purpose of his existence, but only a means. His real purpose in life is to better himself and raise himself to a higher level as a human being. But this he can only do in and through the community whose cultural life he shares.

This community must always exist on the foundations on which the State is based.

He should contribute to the conservation of those foundations. Nature determines the form of this contribution. It is the duty of the individual to return to the community, zealously and honestly, what the community has given him.

He who does this deserves the highest respect and esteem. Material remuneration may be given to him whose work has a corresponding utility for the community; but the ideal recompense must lie in the esteem to which everybody has a claim who serves his people with whatever powers Nature has bestowed upon him and which have been developed by the training he has received from the national community.

Then it will no longer be dishonourable to be an honest craftsman; but it will be a cause of disgrace to be an inefficient State official, wasting God’s day and filching daily bread from an honest public. Then it will be looked upon as quite natural that positions should not be given to persons who of their very nature are incapable of filling them.

Furthermore, this personal efficiency will be the sole criterion of the right to take part on an equal juridical footing in general civil affairs.