Notes on Marxism in 1968

Abstract

A hundred and fifty years after his birth Karl Marx is universally regarded as one of the most important men who ever lived, and far the most important who in modern times has taken the affairs of mankind for his subject instead of the sweet simplicities of art or science. For a century the world's moneygrubbers have thought of him nervously as a Guy Fawkes lurking in the cellars of civilization with barrels of gunpowder. All the worst scoundrels of our age, from Hitler down to McCarthy, have been his worst enemies. If all the last nails knocked into his coffin by the latest pamphleteer were laid end to end they would stretch from Highgate to Washington. Yet Marx was the herald of a revolution that has not come, or has come only once in eastern Europe and once in Asia, on lines quite different from what he anticipated. In the homelands of capitalism where he lived in expectation of the overthrow of class society in his own lifetime, it now appears stronger than ever, part of the order of nature. The working class on which he pinned his faith has turned out to be, once acclimatized to life among factory chimneys, as unrevolutionary as the French peasantry after 1789. Marx's vision of workingmen overturning the Bank of England may look scarcely less fanciful today than the dreams of those Calvinist zealots before the Thirty Years War who wanted to march on Rome and then Constantinople and overthrow Pope and Sultan. It might well seem time for him to be dismissed as simply one more great man of a bygone day, and kicked upstairs into an academic pantheon as elastic as the Hindu heaven.