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He organized the great International Association of Workmen, which set all Europe in a blaze and extended even to America. His great book, "Capital" Das Kapital which was not completed until the last years of his life, is read to-day by thousands as an almost sacred work.
Compared to Darwin, he seemed to have no power of observation: there was not a fact in Das Kapital that had not been taken out of a book, nor a discussion that had not been opened by somebody else's pamphlet. No matter: he exposed the bourgeoisie and made an end of its moral prestige. That was enough: like Darwin he had for the moment the World Will by the ear.
"I have noo some kapital pictures o' auld Arbroathians to show you," said Sandy to the bairns "the reg'lar rale Reed Lichties.
Did not the Communist Manifesto appear many years before "Das Kapital"? Nothing is more instructive than a socialist "experience" meeting at which everyone tries to tell how he came to be converted. These gatherings are notoriously untruthful in fact, there is a genial pleasure in not telling the truth about one's salad days in the socialist movement.
They know his work, having studied his Das Kapital with the devotion and earnestness with which an older generation of Christians studied the Bible, but they are very generally unacquainted with the man himself. Although more than twenty-six years have elapsed since the death of Marx, there is no adequate biography of him in any language.
It is really unfair to speak of the Marxian philosophy as a political force. It is juster to speak of the Marxian tradition. So when I write of Marx's influence I have in mind what men and women in socialist meetings, in daily life here in America, hold as a faith and attribute to Marx. There is no pretension whatever to any critical study of "Das Kapital" itself.
In his view, it was men who could read and write who hatched the diabolical political ideologies and designed the frightful nuclear weapons of that period. In his mind, Literacy is equated with 'Mein Kampf' and 'Das Kapital', with the A-bomb and the H-bomb, with concentration camps and blasted cities. From this position, of course, I beg politely to differ.
Ernst Haeckel: The Wonders of Life, p. 413. Arthur Schopenhauer: Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Zweiter Band, Kapital 46, Von der Nichtigkeit und dem Leiden des Lebens, p. 669. Our last lecture started with the proposition that the dominant influence in the intellectual and practical activity of the modern age is man's scientific mastery over life.
Marx's greatest work, Das Kapital, published in 1867, was to the new revolution just such an inspiration and guide as the Contrat Social of Rousseau was to the revolution of '89. The brilliant genius of Lassalle yielded to the sway of the principle of Nationality, and ultimately of Empire, as strongly as the narrower and gloomier nature of Marx was repelled by these principles.
His theory of civilisation had been promulgated already in Buckle's History of Civilization, a book as epoch-making in the minds of its readers as Das Kapital.
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