BOOKS
123
letariat with its own weakness, and, as usual with the great deeds of demo–
crats, the leaders had the satisfaction of being able to charge their 'people'
with desertion, and the people the satisfaction of being able to charge its
leaders with selling it."
To preserve his image of Marx as an advocate of populism, Dr. Rosen–
berg simply avoids all mention of this world-famous document. There is
perhaps a reference to it in the statement that "after 1850 Marx and
Engels emphasized the differences which separated them from the official
democrats, in a sharply defined manner." But, the same paragraph at pnce
insists, "they remained democrats in the best sense of the word and in
the
spirit of 1848."
Having shown that Marx, in his eagerness to advance the Revolution
everywhere to its next stage, did not concern himself primarily with the
program-details of non-revolutionary labor parties, Dr. Rosenberg inter–
prets Marx's controversies with Lassalle and with the German Social
Democracy as arising essentially out of his objections (held by Rosenberg
to be correct) to the formation of an independent labor party. "The more
clearly," says he, "the vanguard of the proletariat realized its own position
within b9urgeois society, the greater became its tendency to isolate itself."
And, of course, being a revolutionist, Marx was against "isolation".
The cause of the failures of the working class parties Rosenberg finds
in the fact that the workers abandoned the idea of the "People's Revolu–
tion", and became too class conscious! And yet Rosenberg himself tells us
that by
1849
"revolutionary democracy of the type which had been created
by
the Great French Revolution was now finally finished." Despite this,
he demands that Marx be accepted as the Don Quixote of moribund
Jacobinism.
·
In 1870 Engels expressed his fears concerning action by the Paris
workers for the purpose of national defense: "They can lose nothing by
waiting. Any boundary changes are only provisional and will again
be
reversed. It would be madness to fight
for
the
bourgeoisie
against the
Prussians...." (italics ours) According to Rosenberg, this should not be
read as advice to the workers to act in their own interests only, but as a
warning against separate class action.
Rosenberg's argument bears its full. harvest in his version of events
since 1895. Criticising the pre-war Social Democrats, he does not charge
them with treachery or cowardice before national imperialism, but rather
chides them for an excessive class consciousness which separated the work–
ers from bourgeois politics. With his happy concept of unity, which dis–
regards all specific programs, Rosenberg can embrace either a successful
Revolution or an abnegation of class consciousness like the Popular Front.
Thus Lenin is accepted as a true Marxist, precisely because he is inter–
preted to be a "revolutionary Democrat" and not a Socialist. Lenin's party
was an anti-democratic organization of professional revolutionaries? This,
too,
is in the Marxist-Jacobin tradition. Today, the Communist Interna–
tional has also returned to this tradition, because together with the social-
