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again by observing that in reading Rilke one would scarcely suppose that
man was a social animal, a fact tha:t is endlessly illuminated in Homer,
Shakespeare, and Tolstoy. But if Rilke loses by this kind of comparison,
he invites such a comparison at all times and above all by the overwhelm-
ing beauty in the pages of this hook.
DELMORE ScHWARTZ
MARX AND "THE PEOPLE"
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIALISM. By Arthur Rosenberg. Knopf.
$3.50.
"The working class is revolutionary or
it
is nothing."-Marx
With the rise of the bourgeois-democratic State, the "old, honorable,
and intelligible word 'Democracy' " became a historical ambiguity of the
first order: on the one hand, a political system carefully designed to hold
the masses in check; on the other, the traditional name of the revolutionary
mass movement, whatever its form, towards popular rule.
Today this double content of Democracy is manipulated as a disguise
for every variety of political and social conspiracy. The Republican Party
defends The People (of Wall Street) against the Government (of Wall
Street). On a more pedantic plane, the lind and Illrd Internationals
identify early red Democracy with present-day imperialist Republics, in
order to give a "revolutionary" tinge to chauvinism-under a crimson
spotlight the New Deal marches arm in arm with Captain Shays and John
Brown. To complete the gamut, Mussolini presents the Fascist State as a
true Democracy in the.Jacohin sense, in as much as it forces the "participa–
tion" of the masses in State affairs. With the dwindling of the revolution–
ary stream of the old democratic movement, its liberating language has
become the hitter source of the most cynical and humorless jests.
A
new contribution to chaos has recently been issued by Dr. Arthur
Rosenberg, ex-Communist member of the Reichstag, whose histories of
Bolshevism and of the German Republic contained a number of interesting
theses. The significant word in his
Democracy and Socialism
is the "and".
At the start, the democratic and socialist movements were linked together;
hence, the author contends, the true spirit of Marxism requires that an
absolute conjunction he maintained between Democracy and Socialism.
Obviously, this conclusion might mean almost anything, when everyone,
from Hitler to Haile Selassie, is in favor of Democracy according to some
definition, and only the conservatives are opposed to "Socialism", now or
later. But Dr. Rosenberg makes use of the ambiguities of Democracy in
order to present an original "Marxist" picture of how Democracy and
Socialism interpenetrate.
Democracy and Socialism
is divided into three sections: Democracy
before Marx; Democracy and Marxism, 1845-95; From 1895 to the pres-
