Page:Rosa Luxemburg - The Crisis in the German Social-Democracy (The "Junius" Pamplhet) - 1918.pdf/84

 82 The cessation of the class struggle was, therefore, a deplorably one-sided affair. While capitalist oppression and exploitation, the worst enemies of the working class remain, socialist and labor union leaders have generously delivered the working class, without a struggle, into the hands of the enemy for the duration of the war. While the ruling classes are fully armed with the property and supremacy rights, the working class, at the advice of the Social-Democracy has laid down its arms,

Once before, in 1848 in France, the proletariat experienced this miracle of class harmony, this fraternity of all classes of a modern capitalist state of society. In his "Class Struggles in France," Kari Marx writes: In the eyes of the proletariat, who confused the moneyed aristocracy with the bourgeoisie, in the imagination of republican idealists, who denied the very existence of classes, or attributed them to a monarchical form of government, in the deceitful phrases of those bourgeois who had hitherto been excluded from power, the rule of the bourgeoisie was ended when the republic was proclaimed. At that time all royalists became republican, all millionaires in Paris became laborers. In the word "Fraternité," the brotherhood of man, this imaginary destruction of classes found official expression. This comfortable abstraction from class differences, this sentimental balancing of class interests, this utopian disregard of the class struggle, this "Fraternité" was the real slogan of the February revolution… The Parisian proletariat rejoiced in an orgy of brotherhood… The Parisian proletariat, looking upon the republic as its own creation, naturally acclaimed every act of the provisional bourgeois government. Willingly it permitted Caussidiere to tise its members as policemen to protect the property of Paris. With unquestioning faith it allowed Louis Blanc to regulate wage differences betwen workers and masters. In their eyes it was a matter of honor to preserve the fair name of the republic before the peoples of Europe."