THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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as people put up with it and stand for it. The profoundly low level of wages which seems inseparable from state capitalism, and the lasting incapacitation would be
unbearable in the long run, — even if fascism does not enter the land of no return in a final world war which it provokes and, in accordance with the law with which it
fell in, must continue to provoke. In all respects, however, something results from the evil latency of state capitalism which helps fascism and makes it almost concrete,
the tendency towards the capitalist collective in the vacuum of disappeared free competition: thus state capitalism is the long­sought element of reality in otherwise so
insubstantial fascism. The latter uses anachronism and the dull rage of its protest in the seduced masses, but it is eminently up to date in its leadership. It is not merely
spookish here, it is also the real ape of a real tendency, that towards socialization of the forces of production; fascism made state capitalism formidable as a real
alternative. And this is joined by the most central danger of the delusion of order, and indeed socialism, with which the capitalist collective has draped itself and may
drape itself again — state capitalism beneath the mask of state socialism. Hence above all the forgery of security, indeed liberation from the struggle for life which has
become horrifying; what is lost in the way of free time and freedom seems to come in again through a guarantee, through guaranteed employment, through subsidized
leisure. If there is anything in which the average American citizen in particular, the former risk­taker par excellence, is even more interested than he is in profit­making, it
is life insurance; even the former capitalist pioneer will unhesitatingly take security in exchange for vanished advancement, and fascism seemed and seems to guarantee
this security at least for the Babbitts of all zones as if it were — the future state. It was a grave flaw that the existing possibilities of state capitalism have been so little
worked out in socialist literature itself; an even graver one that the mountainous contrasts to socialism have not found any sufficient analysis. Through the first flaw
fascism came as a complete surprise, through the second social democracy was reassured about its inactivity and about the allegedly dialectical optimism it showed for
the big companies. Capitalism seemed, as is well­known, to change into socialism of its own accord as soon as it was further synthesized; indeed even the Prussian
militarizations of economic life, which began in 1914, the so­called ideas of 1914, appeared as socialism here. Through the second flaw: the insufficient distinction
between state capitalism and — temporary — state socialism, it was made particularly easy anyway for social democracy and the rest of the bourgeoisie to overlook
its own state capitalism, by