Marx The Prophet

Marxism is a religion.

To the believer it presents:

1. A system of ultimate ends that:

• embody the meaning of life
• are absolute standards to judge events and actions by

2. A guide to a plan of salvation.

Marxist socialism belongs to that subgroup which promises paradise on this side of the grave.

Part of Marx’ success is his barrelful of white-hot phrases, of impassioned accusations.

But he was a prophet.

His time was the:

• zenith of bourgeois realization

• time of mechanistic materialism

Faith was rapidly falling away from all classes of society.

Marxism is essentially a product of the bourgeois mind.

Marx tried replacing actual feelings by a true or false revelation of the logic of social evolution.

By doing this and by at tributing—quite unrealistically— to the masses his own shibboleth of “class consciousness,” he undoubtedly falsified

The true psychology of the workman is that the workman wishes:

• to become a small bourgeois
• to be helped to that status by political force

but in so far as his teaching took effect he also expanded and ennobled it. He did not weep any sentimental tears about the beauty of the socialist idea.

This is one of his claims to superiority over what he called the Utopian Socialists.

He did not glorify the workmen into heroes of daily toil as bourgeois love to do when trembling for their dividends.

He was free from any tendency, so conspicuous in some of his weaker followers, toward licking the workman’s boots.

He had probably a clear perception of what the masses are and he looked far above their heads toward social goals altogether beyond what they thought or wanted.

He never taught any ideals as set by himself.

Such vanity was quite foreign to him. As every true prophet styles himself the humble mouthpiece of his deity, so Marx pretended no more than to speak the logic of the dialectic process of history.

There is dignity in all this which compensates for many pettinesses and vulgarities with which, in his work and in his life, this dignity formed so strange an alliance.

Marx was personally much too civilized to fall in with those vulgar professors of socialism who do not recognize a temple when they see it. He was perfectly able to understand a civilization and the “relatively absolute” value of its values, however far removed from it he may have felt himself to be.

In this respect no better testimony to his broad-mindedness can be offered than the Communist Manifesto which is an account nothing short of glowing 2 of the achievements of capitalism; and even in pronouncing pro futuro death sentence on it, he never failed to recognize its historical necessity. This attitude, of course, implies quite a lot of things Marx himself would have been unwilling to accept. But he was undoubtedly strengthened in it, and it was made more easy for him to take, because of that perception of the organic logic of things to which his theory of history gives one particular expression. Things social fell into order for him, and however much of a coffeehouse conspirator he may have been at some junctures of his life, his true self despised that sort of thing. Socialism for him was no obsession which blots out all other colors of life and creates an unhealthy and stupid hatred or contempt for other civilizations. And there is, in more senses than one, justification for the title claimed for his type of socialist thought and of socialist volition which are welded together by virtue of his fundamental position: Scientific Socialism.