Aristocratic Socialism: Introduction

What compelled so little an egalitarian as Aristotle to condemn usury?  What drives such a capitalistic society as America to be more fanatical a promoter of social egalitarianism than any Communist society ever was?  Is "equality" really "socialist?"  Is "inequality" really "capitalist?"

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The merchant says: "To life!"  Against this vampire slogan, true socialism answers, in the words of Mihai Eminescu: "This world of life is merely a dream of Death eternal."  That is the motto of the emperor and the proletarian.  

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Democratic socialism?  But how?  Nothing is more anti-social than democracy.

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Was Marx a "cultural Marxist?"  Were the founders of "cultural Marxist" pseudo-sociology even Marxian?  No to both, of course, but there is something profoundly powerful about this looming Nosferatu of "cultural Marxism."  We have to admit it, those of us who wish for a better term to emerge for this perverse impulse, this devolution-as-progress of today.

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Everything that is indeed socially corrosive in Marx is in reality bourgeois nihilism.  Everything false in his economic system is a form of capitalism.  His celebration of capitalism's victory over pre-capitalist civilization is an attitude far older than himself; and this viewpoint, as old as medieval Venice, is the inner form of all "cultural Marxism."

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Gottfried Feder, although clearly anti-Jewish, did not base his critique of Marx on Marx's ethnicity.  Feder's attack on Marxism is altogether more interesting than that.  Feder argued that classifying loan-interest capital as just another form of "capital" is not only misguided, but misleading.  In the doctrine of Federism, the Marxist critique of capitalism is useless and deceptive, because it regards loan-interest capital as just another form of "capital."  This is akin to regarding cyanide as just another ingredient in the salad.

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As there are different ways of looking at race, so there are also different ways of looking at capital.  There is taxonomical race, physiognomical race, and spiritual race, in that ascending order of importance.  Likewise, capital can also be seen taxonomically, physiognomically, or spiritually, again in that ascending order of priority.

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Spengler's distinction of "money" from true "wealth" can be traced back to Schopenhauer, who distinguished "interest" from true "capital."  These distinctions belong to the physiognomical way of classifying capital, which ranks above Marx's taxonomical way of looking at capital, and below St. Basil the Great's spiritual way of seeing capital.  A true heroic socialism, which can also be called aristocratic socialism, makes use of all three, though without losing sight of this iron ranking.