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Updated: June 9, 2025
The Marxists wandered for years in this void, striving, with fanatical superstition, to suppress the Revisionists who, facing the fact that the Social-Democratic party was lost, were trying to find the path by the light of contemporary history instead of vainly consulting the oracle in the pages of Das Kapital.
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.
For what operates in history is not the systematic idea as a genius formulated it, but shifting imitations, replicas, counterfeits, analogies, and distortions in individual minds. Thus Marxism is not necessarily what Karl Marx wrote in Das Kapital, but whatever it is that all the warring sects believe, who claim to be the faithful.
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.
There was nothing about Socialism in the widely read first volume of Das Kapital: every reference it made to workers and capitalists shewed that Marx had never breathed industrial air, and had dug his case out of bluebooks in the British Museum.
I haven't the least intention of being converted, but I don't want to be an ignoramus. Aileen and Sibyl and I did start Marx's Das Kapital in German! We nearly died of it. But I felt sure that this man, Kirkpatrick, had studied his subject, if only because his language changed so completely when he talked about it. It was as if he were quoting, but intelligently.
Carlyle's French Revolution and Past and Present burnt with similar flame; so did Ruskin's Unto this Last and the series of Fors Clavigera; so did Mazzini's God and the People, Karl Marx's Kapital, Henry George's Progress and Poverty, Tolstoy's What shall we do? and so did Proudhon's Qu'est ce que la Propriété? at the time of its birth.
He was fond, says Liebknecht, of quoting as his motto the defiant line of Dante, with which he afterwards concluded his preface to 'Das Kapital': 'Segui il tuo corso e lascia dir le genti." It is to Marx's everlasting credit that he set the intellectual standard of socialism on the most vigorous intellectual basis he could find.
Even in Germany, which became the home of orthodox Marxianism and developed a powerful Social-Democratic party, nominally accepting the doctrine of ``Das Kapital'' as all but verbally inspired, even there the enormous increase of wealth in all classes in the years preceding the war led Socialists to revise their beliefs and to adopt an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary attitude.
From the gospels you cannot deduce the history of Christianity, nor from the Constitution the political history of America. It is Das Kapital as conceived, the gospels as preached and the preachment as understood, the Constitution as interpreted and administered, to which you have to go. The actual culture exists in people far too busy to indulge in the strange trade of formulating their beliefs.
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