Marx The Prophet
Table of Contents
PART I The Marxian Doctrine
MOST of the creations of the intellect or fancy pass away for good after an hour or a generation.
Some, however, do not. They suffer eclipses but they come back again. They come back not as unrecognizable elements of a cultural inheritance.
These are the great ones. This is applicable to the message of Marx.
But greatness by revivals makes it independent of our love or hate.
A great achievement might be from a power of darkness.
In the case of the Marxian system, such adverse judgment or even disproof, by its very failure to injure fatally, only serves to bring out the power of the structure.
The last twenty years have witnessed a most interesting Marxian revival.
The great teacher of the socialist creed came into his own in Soviet Russia.
The Marxian revival in the United States is less easy to explain.
Until the twenties, there was no Marxian strain of importance in either the American labor movement or in the thought of the American intellectual.
What Marxism there was always had been superficial, insignificant and without standing.
Germany of all countries had the strongest Marxian tradition.
A small orthodox sect kept alive during the post-war socialist boom as it had during the previous depression.
But the leaders of socialist thought betrayed little taste for reverting to the old tenets and, while worshiping the deity, took good care to keep it at a distance and to reason in economic matters exactly like other economists.
Outside of Russia, therefore, the American phenomenon stands alone.
Marxism is a religion.
To the believer it presents:
- A system of ultimate ends that:
- embody the meaning of life
- are absolute standards to judge events and actions by
- 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 sostrange an alliance.
The Communist Manifesto:
- shows:
- Marx’ broad-mindedness.
- the achievements of capitalism
- pronounced pro futuro death sentence on capitalism
Marx’ socialism is Scientific Socialism.