CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Things and Actions are what they are, and theConsequences of them will be what they will be:Why then should we desire to be deceived?Joseph Butler

No thinker in the nineteenth century has had so direct, deliberateand powerful an influence upon mankind as Karl Marx.Both during his lifetime and after it he exercised an intellectualand moral ascendancy over his followers, the strength of whichwas unique even in that golden age of democratic nationalism,an age which saw the rise of great popular heroes and martyrs,romantic, almost legendary figures, whose lives and words dominatedthe imagination of the masses and created a new revolutionarytradition in Europe. Yet Marx could not, at any time, becalled a popular figure in the ordinary sense: certainly he was inno sense a popular writer or orator. He wrote extensively, but hisworks were not, during his lifetime, read widely; and when, in thelate 1870s, they began to reach the immense public which severalamong them afterwards obtained, their reputation was due not somuch to their intellectual authority as to the growth of the fameand notoriety of the movement with which he was identified.

Marx totally lacked the qualities of a great popular leaderor agitator; he was not a publicist of genius, like the Russiandemocrat Herzen, nor did he possess Mikhail Bakunin's spellbindingeloquence; the greater part of his working life wasspent in comparative obscurity in London, at his writing tableand in the reading room of the British Museum. He was littleknown to the general public, and while towards the end of hislife he became the recognised and admired leader of a powerfulinternational movement, nothing in his life or character stirredthe imagination or evoked the boundless devotion, the intense,almost religious, worship, with which such men as Kossuth,Mazzini, and even Lassalle in his last years, were regarded bytheir followers.

His public appearances were neither frequent nor notablysuccessful. On the few occasions on which he addressed banquetsor public meetings, his speeches were overloaded with matter,and delivered with a combination of monotony and brusqueness,which commanded the respect, but not the enthusiasm, of hisaudience. He was by temperament a theorist and an intellectual,and instinctively avoided direct contact with the masses to thestudy of whose interests his entire life was devoted. To many of hisfollowers he appeared in the role of a dogmatic and sententiousGerman schoolmaster, prepared to repeat his theses indefinitely,with rising sharpness, until their essence became irremovablylodged in his disciples' minds. The greater part of his economicteaching was given its first expression in lectures to working men:his exposition under these circumstances was by all accountsa model of lucidity and conciseness. But he wrote slowly andpainfully, as sometimes happens with rapid and fertile thinkers,scarcely able to cope with the speed of their own ideas, impatientat once to communicate a new doctrine, and to forestall everypossible objection; the published versions, when dealing withabstract issues, tended at times to be unbalanced and obscure indetail, although the central doctrine is never in serious doubt. Hewas acutely conscious of this, and his son-in-law, Paul Lafargue,reports that he once compared himself with the hero of Balzac's'The Unknown Masterpiece', who tries to paint the picturewhich has formed itself in his mind, touches and retouches thecanvas endlessly, to produce at last a formless mass of colours,which to his eye seems to express the vision in his imagination.

He belonged to a generation which cultivated the imaginationmore intensely and deliberately than its predecessors, andwas brought up among men to whom ideas were often more realthan facts, and personal relations meant more than the eventsof the external world; by whom indeed public life was at timesunderstood and interpreted in terms of the rich and elaborateworld of their own private experience. Marx was by nature notintrospective, and took little interest in persons or states of mindor soul; the failure on the part of so many of his contemporariesto assess the importance of the revolutionary transformation ofthe society of their day, due to the swift advance of technologywith its accompaniment of sudden increase of wealth, and, atthe same time, of social and cultural dislocation and confusion,merely excited his anger and contempt.

He was endowed with a powerful, active, concrete, unsentimentalmind, an acute sense of injustice, and little sensibility,and was repelled as much by the rhetoric and emotionalism ofthe intellectuals as by the stupidity and complacency of the bourgeoisie;the first seemed to him, as often as not, aimless chatter,remote from reality, and, whether sincere or false, equally irritating;the second at once hypocritical and self-deceived, blinded tothe salient social features of its time by absorption in the pursuitof wealth and social status.

This sense of living in a hostile and vulgar world (intensifiedperhaps by his latent dislike of the fact that he was born a Jew)increased his natural harshness and aggressiveness, and producedthe formidable figure of popular imagination. His greatest admirerswould find it difficult to maintain that he was a responsiveor tender-hearted man, or concerned about the feelings of mostof those with whom he came into contact; the majority of themen he met were, in his opinion, either...