Oswald Spengler

From The Relationship Between The Social Interpretation of History and San Min Chi I
by William John Gies, 1932

. . . The result of the preliminary inquiry [by Maurice William] justified publication of a general edition, which was issued in 1921. In the following year an edition was published in London by Allen and Unwin. In 1924 a German translation, by Wolfgang E. Groeger¹ with a preface by Dr. Oswald Spengler, was published in Berlin by Trowitzsch and Son. In the preface, Dr. Spengler said :

"William is right in denoting the class-warfare teaching of Marx as socio-pathological. For the class-war, when it has been unleashed by one party, has, on the whole, accomplished nothing—save to render social life more difficult and to brutalize it, and to breed a class of paid labor leaders who make a business of Marxism. In Germany, at least, that has been the consequence of the revolution. Today it is beginning to dawn upon German labor (and this Mr. William also rightly sees) that the worker outside the workshop is a consumer, and in this sense has the same interests as all the other classes. That is, in fact, the fundamental error of the class-war theory, that it would like to divide a people into classes in order to realize an ideology through their opposition. . . . . For Germany, with her propensity to strange theories, William's book is important, because it gives at last an entirely practical criticism of a doctrine which we take far more seriously than it deserves."

      ¹ Dr. Groeger wrote, August 1, 1928, etc. [please see Wolfgang Groeger — (WPT)]

( "The Relationship Between The Social Interpretation of History
and San Min Chi I" by William John Gies, 16 January 1932. )
Sun Yat-sen versus Communism by Maurice William,
Baltimore : Williams & Wilkins 1932.