Marxism

Marxism, both as a political ideology and as a social theory, ultimately derives nearly entirely from the Communist Manifesto, a pamphlet of roughly 12,000 words in the German language published in February 1848. This pamphlet allegedly was authored jointly by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It was prefaced by a short, untitled, and extremely misleading Introduction.

Whatever was going to become true in the long-term future as a consequence of this original publication of the Communist Manifesto, it was certainly not true that the specter of communism was haunting Europe in February 1848. Certainly,1848 was to be a year of revolutions. In Austria, Clemens von Metternich had announced that he was sustaining “a rotten edifice.” King Frederick William IV of Russia summoned Horwegh, the revolutionary poet, to salute “a worthy opponent” and a man of the future. Most observers also agreed with Marx that the coming revolutions would have a social cause and/or an economic cause.

And so they had. But it was not the cause that Marx had foreseen. Whereas he attributed the forthcoming revolutions to capitalism, it would be nearer to the truth to argue that they were caused rather by the lack of capitalism. Apart from Russia, which had already begun to suffer the same new developments as were occurring in some European countries farther to the west, there were two countries that escaped serious revolutionary disturbances. These were the United Kingdom and Belgium, the two countries in which capitalist industrialization had gone the furthest.

Essentially, Marx was neither a philosopher nor a social scientist but rather a prophet. In his own famous later words, he proclaimed, “Philosophers have only given different interpretations of the world; the task is to change it.” The Marxist system began as a propagandist myth, although Marx himself later aspired to make a substantial contribution to both economics and social science. Every argument of the Communist Manifesto was designed to produce an effect—not to interpret the world but rather to change it. The document that the Introduction was actually introducing purported to be the manifesto of the Communist Party. No such party existed at that time, and one object of the manifesto was to call it into existence. Nor had “Communists of various nationalities assembled in London and sketched the following manifesto,” as was stated on the first page. It had been written by Marx alone, without the actual and immediate assistance of even its alleged coauthor Engels.

Nor was the specter of communism haunting all or any part of Europe at the time of that first publication of the Communist Manifesto. Its true purpose was rather to produce that specter and thereby to bring about a future period during which communism actually would haunt Europe and other continents as well.

It is remarkable, and should have been remarked far more often than it was, that both substantial and even increasing numbers of professing social scientists, even during the last quarter of the 20th century, still proclaimed their own attachment to the putative theories and methods of a 19th-century predecessor and that there was apparently only one particular predecessor able to inspire such widespread and continuing devotion—representing a sort of “cult of personality.”

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