ABSTRACT
Authoritative is only the democracy of the agents themselves, struggling, differing, failing, learning; endeavouring to make another world, in light only of some egalitarian, communist, and liberal critical principles. This chapter reconsider some of the democratic resources and some of the democratic deficiencies of one important current within the wider stream of socialism: namely, classical Marxism. Marxism had to be governed by the necessity of being adaptable, open to new data and experience, competing insights, bodies of learning, and to correction and change. He not merely pre-eminent, intellectually more fertile or powerful in Rosa Luxemburg's estimation than other socialist conceptions, but the 'mode of thought' all on its own. Luxemburg's orothodox emphasis on the proletariat as an agency of socialism is a limitation in her democratic perspective. A socialist society must rest on other 'moral foundations', the 'highest idealism in the interests of the whole', 'a true public spirit', than the 'dullness, egoism and corruption' that underpin capitalism.
