“It is no longer important whether Marx’s specific characterizations or charges were justified, whether, for example, German socialism in fact “proclaimed the German nation to be the model nation, and the German Philistine to be the typical man” (51). To the historian of Marxism and of nationalism, German socialism as depicted by Marx appears to have been un attempt, undertaken in the 1840s, to find a place in a changing society for those social groups that Marx saw destined to be destroyed by capitalism: the small bourgeoisie, the craftsmen, and the peasants. This kind of “socialism”, Marx pointed out, proclaimed “its supreme and impartial contempt of all class struggles” (52). (At the same time, this presupposed although Marx did not bother to note it, a national interest and national solidarity common to all classes). Marx certainly agreed with Engels, who declared that: “the fraternisation of the nations, as it is now being accomplished everywhere by the extreme, proletarian, party against the ancient elementary national egoism and the hypocritical, privately egoistic cosmopolitanism of free trade, is more valuable than all German theories on true socialism” (53). On the eve of 1848, Marx was certain that not only was the solution sought by German socialism impossible, but that a bourgeois revolution would at best be short-lived in Germany, and that almost immediately a proletarian revolution would follow” [Roman Szporluk, Communism and Nationalism. Karl Marx versus Friedrich List, New York, 1988] [((51) The Communist Manifesto, p. 37; (52) Ibid, p. 38; (53) Friedrich Engels, “The Festival of Nation”, as translated from the German original by Dirk J: Struik, ‘Birth of the Communist Manifesto’ (New York: International Publishers, 1975), p. 77. See ‘Collected Works’, vol. 6 (London, 1976), p. 3, for a slightly different, “official” translation of this passage]
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- Articolo pubblicato:6 Ottobre 2015