CHAPTER IV
SPARTACUS OR CATILINE?

"The tradition of all past generations," says Marx in his Eighteenth Brumaire, "weighs like an alp upon the brain of the living." As he wrote these lines in 1852, the author of the Communist Manifesto hardly expected that in less than a century he himself would become an alplike tradition weighing upon the brains of many intellectuals opposed to the status quo.

An "alp" is denned in the dictionary as a "demon" or a "nightmare" tormenting the sleeper. That Marxist demon has been appearing in different shapes to those who had fallen under its spell. Those radical intellectuals whose interests were chiefly in the field of philosophical speculation he has been torturing in the guise of dialectical materialism; those who have chosen economic theory as their speciality he has been worrying by his "labor theory of value," while the mere historians, journalists and agitators interested chiefly in radical politics he has been bedeviling by the enormous array of often contradictory statements on political methods, which, according to circumstances, could be used for their justification either by the gradualist democratic Socialists or by the revolutionary-totalitarian Communists.

As a rule, a person selected for torment would suffer from only one of the three aspects of this incubus. The Marx-struck philosophers are usually ignorant of economics -- to mention only Franz Mehring, who in his monumental Marx biography was forced to have Rosa Luxemburg write the analysis of Das Kapital; the economists would have no time for their teacher's excursions into philosophy; while most of the top leaders of the Socialist and Communist parties have been at home only in the commonplaces of his purely political pronouncements expressed in such slogans as "class struggle," "class antagonism," "emancipation of the working class," "dictatorship of the proletariat," "workers of the world, unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains," "withering away of the state," "first phase," and "higher phase of communism."

The older Liebknecht -- the father of Karl Liebknecht -- an intimate of the Teacher and one of the founders of the German socialist movement, was often ridiculed by Marx and Engels because of his lack of understanding of the fundamental philosophical aspects of their teaching. Yet Liebknecht was until his death in 1900 the chief editor of the Vorwärts, the Party's central organ. And during the debates called forth at the turn of the century by Eduard Bernstein's "revision" of some of the basic tenets of Marxism, Ignaz Auer, secretary general and, next to August Bebel, the most powerful man in the Party, openly admitted that the philosophical aspects of Marxism were beyond his ken and that he could not say that he was "a conscious Marxist."¹

Hence it is not astonishing if early in the 1890s -- according to the reminiscences of the outstanding Russian Marxist Martov -- Paul Lafargue, son-in-law of Karl Marx and chief exponent of Marxism in France, could admit to Lenin that after twenty years of socialist activities in France nobody understood Marx in that country.² From the unexpurgated edition of the Marx-Engels correspondence we see that according to the stern Teacher, Lafargue himself constituted no exception.³ "All I know," Marx once said, seeing himself misunderstood by practically all of his followers, "is that I myself am not a Marxist."⁴

And there is also the passage from one of Engels' letters to Marx, in which, referring to the conflict within the Communist League of London (1851), he scornfully remarked that "the people whom we officially considered as belonging to our party did not even understand the rudiments of our thoughts."⁵

Thus, the "rudiments" of Marx's philosophy and economics were obviously intended neither for the rank and file nor for the militants, but for a very few select super-theorists who, by the way, continually disagreed among themselves as to "what Marx really meant."

However, regardless of the uncertainty as to "what Marx really meant," the movement connected with his name continued to grow by leaps and bounds, with Marx's philosophical and economic theories becoming an indoor sport for a few dozens of professional students of these two subjects. The task of these professional theorists, such as, for instance, Karl Kautsky in Germany, was not to lay down the "party line" but to justify in Marxist terms any party line laid down by the real political leaders who were not theorists.

What the leaders of these movements actually knew about those two aspects of Marxism was that the doom of the capitalist system was "inevitable," capitalism, "dialectically" speaking, creating its own "contradiction" -- the proletariat, which eventually would put an end to all exploitation; while, economically speaking, the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, coupled with the disappearance of the middle layers of society and the ever increasing pauperization of the masses, would eventually bring about the "collapse" of the system and the seizure of power by the "working class."

These two essential conclusions of Marxist philosophy and economics have met with some unfortunate accidents. Capitalism -- according to Marx the last possible form of exploitation⁶ -- has ceased to exist on a very large section of the globe, but the "proletariat" which was supposed to become the beneficiary of its demise has merely been saddled with a new master class, the office-holding and managerial bourgeoisie of the totalitarian-collectivist state. And as to the "inevitable" disappearance of the middle layers, and the pauperization of the masses, to be followed by a logically inevitable collapse of capitalism, these, shall we say "optimistic" predictions have long since been made hash of by the growth of a new middle class of intellectual workers and other privileged or semi-privileged employees, and by the improvement of the standard of living of large sections of the working class. And there are no indications in any of Marx's writings that he ever contemplated the exploitative, non-"proletarian" and -- shall we say? -- non-Marxian potentialities of that new middle class of intellectual workers as soon as they become the office-holders and managers of a non-capitalist setup.

As time went on the doctrines and the vocabularies of Marxism began to lose their fascination for the socialist parties. Engaged in practical politics, these organizations were, in various countries, either in control of their respective governments (the Scandinavian countries), or participating in them (France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria) or at least hoping to do so sooner or later. Hence they were rather embarrassed by the ultra-radical, ultra-intransigent aspect of some of their Teacher's anti-capitalist pronouncements. So without explicitly repudiating Marx's theories, they began to ignore them, just as the Christian world ignores the Sermon on the Mount. That attitude was best expressed by a Scandinavian Socialist who, reportedly upon being queried about Marxism, declared that "that was something the Communists read about." Moreover, it may not be amiss to mention that, in their policies, the Socialist parties of the European continent, which had been founded by men professing the Marxist faith, differ in no way from those socialist parties which, like the British Labor Party, have always been indifferent towards those ideas. Hence it may be safely said that, as far as present-day democratic socialism is concerned, Marx might as well never have existed.

Outwardly it would seem that matters are altogether different as far as the Communists are concerned. Marx is still "required reading" for all party members inside and outside the Iron Curtain, because his prediction of capitalism's "inevitable" doom is apt to inspire them with that religious fervor and fanaticism that animated the Christian martyrs and helped Mohammed's first followers to win their victories; and also because the few lines he wrote about revolutionary dictatorship serve them as the doctrinal justification of their policies. It is useless to argue with them that a "proletarian dictatorship" which could only be the result of a revolution, was envisioned by Marx as an inevitable development in absolutist or semi-absolutist countries, such as in his time constituted most of the European continent, but not in countries enjoying political liberty, such as the United States, England and Holland⁷ -- hence by implication also Russia under the democratic Provisional Government, i.e., the Kerensky regime of 1917, established after the downfall of the tsarist system. Looking from this angle, there is no exaggeration in the statement that as far as the Communist method of achieving power is concerned, their teacher was not Karl Marx but a certain revolutionary general by the name of Napoleon Bonaparte.

How, then, is it to be explained that, for all its irrelevancy to the political movements of today, Marxism has maintained its place as the Red Bugaboo in the armory of reactionary propaganda?

The cause of this hatred and execration is certainly neither Marx's "dialectical materialism" nor his "labor theory of value" -- subjects which only an extremely limited circle of savants or would-be-savants have been able to discuss, if not always to understand.

Neither is it his "materialist" (or, more precisely, economic) interpretation of history that has made his views so unpopular with the defenders of the existing system. Some of the aspects of this theory have long since been accepted by many perfectly respectable historians and journalists. That theory, by the way, which stresses the determining role of economic conditions, but disregards such important factors as the role of great men, of religious ideas, and of accidents, was anything but revolutionary at the time when Marx first formulated it. For the idea that "no social formation ever disappears before all the productive forces are developed for which it has room"⁸ was a wet blanket for the aspirations of all those who in Marx's time were dreaming of an immediate overthrow of the capitalist system. (No wonder, then, that this passage was omitted in some Russian Communist texts during the early years of the Revolution, when Socialist opponents of the November Revolution used that argument against Lenin's policies.)

What gave rise to the general execration in which Marxism has been held ever since the middle of the last century was the fact that for many years Marx's name was identified with the First International (founded in 1864) and with the Paris Commune of 1871. Now, the International was a rather harmless affair whose influence was geatly overrated and in which Marx's followers did not always have the upper hand; nor did Marx's views exert any influence upon the Paris uprising of 1871 which was essentially a republican-democratic revolt supported by a large section of the lower middle classes which feared the return of the monarchist regime. But in the last century any organization or uprising challenging the status quo, any defiance of capitalist privilege, such as expressed in the Communist Manifesto, or any theoretical demonstration of the obvious fact that the workers were exploited (the "surplus value" theory) was looked upon in the same light in which the ancient Roman plutocrats viewed the rebellions of their slaves or the conspiracies of their impoverished or declasse fellow citizens.

A tradition once established does not die easily. That nineteenth century tradition current among the privileged classes had it that Marx "invented" the class struggle, though that struggle has been going on ever since the division of the human race into "haves" and "have-nots." It also maintained that he was responsible for the class hatred caused by the rich man's refusal to alleviate the lot of the poor. The Bolsheviks whose leaders made a fetish of Marx's anticapitalist terminology contributed their share to the perpetuation of that tradition.

Marx thus became the Spartacus and the Catiline of the modern world, hated by its beneficiaries and hailed by the more vocal and dissatisfied manual workers and educated declasses. To many malcontent and ambitious intellectuals in particular he has become the benevolent, scientific and inscrutable deity that has already punished the rich behind the Iron Curtain and will soon do the same thing in the rest fo the world, when the man of education will come into his own, sitting on the top of the world, that is, on the backs of the uneducated workers and peasants ...

The fact that both the gradualist-democratic wing of the anticapitalist camp, now called "Socialist," and its revolutionary-totalitarian counterpart which has adopted the "Communist" label, have been able to use a vocabulary derived from the writings of the same teacher, can be explained by the contradictory elements within Marx's personality which made for his sometimes contradictory political attitudes.

There was in him, on the one hand, the extreme left wing champion of the rising middle class, who, at certain moments or in certain situations, such as the German Revolution of 1848, felt and behaved like a liberal bourgeois bent chiefly upon the destruction of feudal reaction, and who, for this reason, ignored, or looked askance at the German workers' attempts to organize unions,⁹ apparently lest they cool the revolutionary-democratic ardor of the German middle class. That progressive bourgeois within Marx, would often forget that he was an international communist or a communist internationalist: in such moments he would write like a rabid chauvinist,¹⁰ and even justify imperialist conquests by a more "advanced" country, as when he asked whether "it was such a misfortune that glorious California has been wrenched from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it?"¹¹ The democratic-bourgeois Realpolitiker in him tried to use the Poles as pawns in a hoped-for conflict between democratic Germany and tsarist Russia by promising the Polish nationalists Baltic and Ukrainian territories, provided the Poles renounced their claims to genuinely Polish lands once annexed by Prussia.¹² That was the non-romantic, practical, "reformist" politician in Marx's make-up, who recommended legal methods of struggle in democratic countries like England, Holland and the United States,¹³ and even admitted the possibility and desirability of compensating, instead of expropriating, the capitalists in such countries.¹⁴ In short, that was the Right wing in Marx, whose gradualism is now emulated, mostly without credit, by the democratic socialist parties; and whose somewhat scandalous excursions into nationalism and chauvinism have from time to time been duplicated by both Socialists and Communists.

On the other hand, there was in him the declasse intellectual who hated the capitalist profiteers of the industrial age. That was the rebel who before the Revolution of 1848 wrote the Communist Manifesto, who predicted and wished for, the violent collapse of capitalism, who after the defeat of the democratic Revolution of 1848, in his despair, joined the Universal Society of Revolutionary Communists,¹⁵ a super-conspiracy which was a sort of invisible headquarters of the International Revolution. It was this Marx who during that period coined the ultra-leftist slogans which six or seven decades later were to be revived by Trotsky and Lenin. That was the romantic, the "proletarian," the irreconciliable rebel in his make-up, the knight-errant of world revolution and of what he called the "emancipation of the working class."

This dual nature of Marx evokes the memory of a famous Socialist leader who, by the way, was not a Marxist. A few years after the turn of the century a French left-wing journalist wrote a lampoon on Jean Jaures, top leader of the French Socialist Party, a great savant and an orator of genius, the like of whom his country, and perhaps the world, had not heard since Mirabeau and Danton. In that good-natured satire Jaures was presented as a double personality -- a combination of Sancho Panza and Don Quixote. The paunchy squire in him was the symbol of the practical aspect of his conciliatory, "reformist" politics, ready to support any liberal or progressive cabinet against the Right, and at the same time very impatient with the ultra-leftist elements within his own party. The knight-errant in him was the incorruptible preacher of the socialist ideal, the man who might have been the leading bourgeois statesman of his country, yet declined any ministerial post, to keep his hands clean and to remain the champion of the masses.

A few years after Jaures' assassination in 1914 by a reactionary fanatic, a split within the French Socialist Party which occurred in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, resulted in Jaures' daily Humanite being taken over by the victorious pro-Bolshevik wing and becoming the organ of the French Communist Party. Jaures' name remained on the masthead of the paper. Thus the great tribune is now venerated and claimed in France by both Socialists and Communists, just as is the name of Karl Marx by the Socialists and Communists the world over.

Many things have changed in the world and in the character of the radical movements since the death of Marx. For though both Socialists and Communists pay obeisance to the great thinker, there is a difference in the treatment of Marx by the two warring wings of anticapitalism. The Socialists prefer to mention his name as little as possible, while the Communists have chosen to besmirch it continuously by pretending to venerate it -- just as did the Crusaders and the Inquisitors to another famous Teacher.

There are non-denominational Christians who believe that the various churches have strayed away altogether from the original Teaching. There are also numerous Marxists, pro-Marxists, near-Marxists, and ex-Marxists who share the opinion of Professor Sidney Hook, that "the history that has already been made in its [Marxism's] name has been made by its counterfeits -- German Social Democracy and Russian Bolshevism."¹⁶ The well-known Marx-student had in mind, on the one hand, the extreme opportunism of the German Socialists who, during World War I, had made peace with imperialism, and, on the other hand, the totalitarian inferno established by Lenin and his disciples. As far back as 1923, Leon Trotsky, at the outset of his struggle against the Old Guard of the Communist Party whom he attacked as opportunist, had pointed out that the outstanding leaders of the Socialist International such as "Wilhelm Liebknecht [the father of Karl], Bebel, Paul Singer, Victor Adler, Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, Lafargue, Guesde and others, were the direct and immediate disciples of Marx and Engels," and that "all these leaders, some of them partly, others entirely, degenerated in the direction of opportunism."¹⁷ One wonders whether it is justified to speak about "counterfeits" or "degeneracy" when all of the Teacher's outstanding disciples inevitably turned "counterfeits" or "opportunists." (For Trotsky, apparently next to Lenin the only unadulterated disciple of Marx and Engels at their revolutionary best, by naively or hypocritically accepting the U.S.S.R. as a "workers state," himself "degenerated" in the direction of totalitarianism.) Or whether it is not safer to assume that the germ of that epidemic corruption was imbedded in the very core of the teachings of Marx and Engels.

That "germ" was isolated, as it were, by the Polish ex-Marxist revolutionist Waclaw Machajski¹⁸ who pointed out that Marx was unable to make a distinction between the interests of the manual workers and those of the rising new middle class of intellectual workers. Like most men, Marx was a victim of his own delusions in which he saw himself as something different from, and better than, he really was. There is no doubt that, under the spell of such a self-complacent delusion, the author of the Communist Manifesto saw himself as a champion of the working class, the Spartacus, as it were, of the slaves of the modern world. (The fact is that, in a family game of questions and answers, he once actually designated Spartacus as his favorite hero.¹⁹) He did not conceive of the possibility of any form of exploitation, or of any new class system once his archenemy, the capitalist, has been eliminated.²⁰ In his opinion, the better "endowed" individuals (i.e., the office-holders and managers of the "first phase of communism"), though better provided for materially, did not constitute a privileged class, for every one of them "ranks as a worker like his fellows."²¹ Bakunin's amazingly correct prediction²² that these office-holders and managers might become the ruling and exploiting class of a non-capitalist, Marx-inspired future, he dismissed with the remark "quelle reverie!'"²³ By this rejection which was the logical outcome of his millenarian concept that capitalism is the last possible form of exploitation,²⁴ Marx supplied a convenient ideology to, and thus paved the way for, that horde of self-styled "emancipators" of the working class who, whether they were opportunist Socialists or totalitarian Communists, consciously or unconsciously identified their own rise to a higher class status with the "abolition of classes."

In short, though subjectively convinced that he was the modern Spartacus,²⁵ the champion of the slaves of the industrial age, he was objectively a latter-day philosophical Catiline, an ideologist of the propertyless new middle and lower middle class of intellectual workers aspiring to step into the shoes of the capitalists. It is beside the point whether he was conscious of the historical role which he thus played. For as he himself put it, men are not to be judged by what they think of themselves and by what they say, but by what they really are and do.²⁶ Marx undoubtedly fathered the Eberts and the Noskes, Socialists who, by entrusting monarchist generals and magistrates with the defense of the Weimar Republic, paved the way for Hitler, and also the Lenins and the Trotskys whose "proletarian dictatorship" led straight to Stalin and to his worthy successors. Had Marx been a Spartacus -- in the sense of a champion of the real interests of the horny-handed underdog -- he would have placed all the emphasis upon the distribution of the good things of life and not upon the conquest of power with the ensuing socialization of the means of production. For the horny-handed underdog, being under-educated, cannot get power, while those who get power "in his behalf" -- regardless of the philosophies they profess or whether they are college-bred highbrows or self-educated middlebrows who once swung the hammer -- will always use their power with an eye to maintaining their newly won privileged position -- capitalism or no capitalism.

In Section III of his Communist Manifesto (1848) which deals with "Socialist and Communist Literature" Marx brands as reactionary and utopian all the socialist and communist schools -- outside his own -- which prior to 1848 carried on their activities in France, Germany and England. Out of the 3,500 words filling that chapter, less than 130 deal with the "writings of Babeuf and others" which are condemned as having "necessarily a reactionary character" because they "inculcated universal asceticism and social leveling in its crudest form." The name of the foremost apostle of that school, Filippo Buonarroti, is not even mentioned. Nor is that of Bazard, Saint-Simon's outstanding disciple who actually imparted a socialist content to the views of his non-socialist teacher. Instead, one is regaled with pages upon pages of attacks against "feudal socialism," "petty-bourgeois socialism," "conservative or bourgeois socialism" and "critical-utopian socialism and communism," all of them brands or aspects of socialism which have long since vanished and lost any significance for the generations that were inspired by the ideas of Karl Marx; while it is only the ideas of Buonarroti and Bazard which are alive today. How come?

To be sure, there are at present no socialist or communist parties to whose leaders the name of Buonarroti (and of his teacher Babeuf) or of Bazard are more than barely audible echoes of a very distant past. Yet the fact is, paradoxical as it may sound, that the main ideas of these well-nigh forgotten apostles had very early become the essential, though unavowed, ingredients of Marx's political views and that consequently they are still dominating the basic concepts of his followers.

Francois-Noel ("Gracchus") Babeuf (1760-1797) has gone down in history as the organizer of the Conspiracy of the Equals which, in 1796, less than three years before Napoleon's coup, aimed at overthrowing the Directory and at setting up a revolutionary dictatorship, for the purpose, as tradition has it, of ushering in a communist-equalitarian society. The conspiracy was betrayed and the martyrdom of Babeuf -- he was executed in 1797 -- became the point of departure for an ultra-radical movement during the 1830s and 1840s, known as Babouvism. The grand old man of that movement, whose participants were mostly educated declasses with a sprinkling of self-educated manual workers, was Filippo Buonarroti (1761-1837), a survivor of Babeuf's conspiracy, whose book La Conspiration pour l'Egalite, dite de Babeuf (Brussels, 1828) became the bible of the Babouvists.

The doctrine of the Babouvists was simplicity itself and can be summed up in six words: revolutionary dictatorship and equality of incomes. Yet the matter was not as simple as that. Babeuf honestly believed in equality of incomes as the basis of social justice (and so did also Buonarroti) and he also saw in that slogan a good propaganda device for winning over the poorer sections of the population. But, while preaching it, he was closely associated with, and his organ, Le Tribun du Peuple, was financed by, well-to-do Robespierrists whom the Thermidorians had deprived of their political influence. The demagogy of the "Equals" appears clearly from the fact that they incongruously combined propaganda for equality of incomes with a cult of the memory of Robespierre, the same Robespierre who had shown no pity for advocates of communism or of economic equality. In other words, had the "Equals" won, they would have established a dictatorship of the anti-Thermidorian Jacobins (Robespierrists and Left-wing ex-Thermidorians) -- with "equality of incomes" fated to play the role of a very, very distant "higher phase" of the Revolution. For their "Act of Insurrection," the last document in which the conspirators called upon the masses to rise, did not contain a word about communism.

Both Mathiez and Aulard, France's outstanding historians of the Great Revolution -- the former a pro-Communist, the latter a moderate liberal -- agree that it was not Babeuf's equalitarianism which was the subject of the indictment against the conspirators. What actually called forth persecution against them was Babeuf's advocacy of a "plebeian Vendee," i.e., his call for a civil war. Mathiez also points out that all of the 650 subscribers to Le Tribun du Peuple belonged to the well-to-do classes. So it was simply an attempt of ousted politicians -- Robespierrists and disgruntled Left-wing Thermidorians -- to return to power through the use of equalitarian slogans, with the honest but confused dreamer Babeuf as their stooge and "fall guy."

The French Babouvists' foremost man of action during the 1830s, Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881), was not given to indulging in dreams about a perfect society. (His followers, later to be called Blanquists, were at bottom Babouvists without the equalitarian vocabulary.) He was out for what he called a "Parisian dictatorship," i.e., a dictatorship of his Parisian following of educated declasses over the rest of France. Marx, whose appetites were similar to those of Blanqui, had a very high regard for the perpetual conspirator and prisoner; in one of his pamphlets he called him the "leader of the proletarian party in France" -- though those "proletarians" were almost exclusively college students and all sorts of unemployed or underpaid intellectuals, professionals and white collar workers. It was from him that, beyond any doubt, Marx got the idea of what he called the "dictatorship of the proletariat." The "proletarian" label attached to Marx's concept of a revolutionary dictatorship was apparently to serve as a compensation for dispensing with the equalitarian verbiage of the pre-Blanquist Babouvists which Marx, as we saw, considered as Utopian and reactionary, and apparently also as bad propaganda among the educated because, as conceived in the writings of Babeuf and his close followers, it involved a somewhat barbarous renunciation of the refinements of culture.

At the opposite pole from the equalitarian Babouvists (prior to the emergence of the non-utopian Blanqui) was that school of French socialism which is referred to as Saint-Simonianism. Its followers were not the hungry, underpaid or unemployed declasse intellectuals, ready to rise in bloody revolt at any moment for the sake of getting hold of the job-dispensing government machine. The Saint-Simonians were upper-middle class intellectuals, professors, technicians, engineers, managers, who dreamt of stepping peacefully into the shoes of the financiers and other coupon-clipping capitalists. In short they were the technocrats or, shall we say, "managerialists" of more than a century ago. Both the ideas of a violent revolution and of equality of incomes were anathema to them, and in a famous statement made in 1831 their outstanding spokesman Saint-Amand Bazard vigorously dissociated his school from any equalitarian tendencies. His and his school's principle was "to each capacity according to its works." The Saint-Simonians believed in gradual transition from private to government ownership and they did not disguise the authoritarian, hierarchical and even totalitarian character of the system to which they aspired.

Karl Marx could not help being aware of Bazard's views. His father-in-law, the highly cultured Baron von Westphalen, was a Saint-Simonian²⁷ and tried to impart those ideas to his son-in-law. The progressive German nobleman and the Jewish intellectual of genius could certainly find a common ground in accepting the idea of an intellectual elite that would take the place of the capitalist money grabbers and the semi-feudal, reactionary landed aristocracy.

However, the realist Marx could likewise not help being aware of the fact that under the conditions prevailing in his time it was more than Utopian to expect -- as did the Saint-Simonians -- that the ruling property-owning elite might be persuaded to yield its ascendance to a new elite of technicians and savants, even though that new elite was firmly determined to keep the masses in their place.

So Marx combined the revolutionary dictatorial aspirations of the Babouvists, whose equalitarian verbiage he rejected, with the hierarchical bureaucratic "ideal" of the Saint-Simonians from whom he differed mainly on the question of methods of attaining it.

In the preface to his Critique of Political Economy Marx wrote that "mankind always takes up only such problems as it can solve." The elimination of private capitalist privilege was in his opinion mankind's great problem whose solution could be achieved by the seizure of power by his followers. And he was wise enough to realize that in order to get the horny-handed underdog to fight for this aim, it was necessary to tell him that the rule of Marx's educated followers was identical with the "emancipation of the working class."

In short, he was the Catiline of our age using the language of Spartacus.

1 Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des Parteitags abgehalten zu Hannover, 1899, Berlin, 1899, p. 208.

2 L. Martov, Zapiski Sotsialdemokrata (Reminiscences of a Social Democrat) Berlin-Moscow, 1921, Vol. I, pp. 263-264, 268-269.

3 Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels, Briefwechsel, Berlin, 1931, Vol. IV, p. 569.

4 Franz Mehring, Karl Marx, New York, 1935, p. 553. -- B. Nicolaievsky and O. Maenchen-Helfen, Karl Marx, Philadelphia, 1936, p. 378.

5 Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels, op. cit. Vol. I, p. 149.

6 K. Marx, Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie, Berlin, 1859, Preface.

7 Nicolaievsky, op. cit. pp. 363-364.

8 Karl Marx, op. cit. Preface.

9 See Marx-Engels Briefwechsel, Berlin, 1929, Vol. I, p. 100.

10 Marx-Engels op. cit. Vol. IV pp. 302, 338, 490, 569. See also Heinrich Cunow, Partei-Zusammenbruch? Berlin, 1915, pp. 33-36.

11 Heinrich Cunow, op. cit. p. 34 quoting long passages from Marx's Neue Rheinische Zeitung, February 14, 1849. See also Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus, Vol. IX, p. 328.

12 Chapter VIII of Karl Marx's Revolution und Kontre-Revolution in Deutschland.

13 Nicolaievsky, loc. cit.

14 Friedrich Engels' article in Die Neue Zeit, Stuttgart, 1894-1895, p. 305.

15 B. Nicolaievsky and O. Maenchen-Helfen, op. cit., pp. 208-209.

16 S. Hook, Reason, Social Myths and Democracy, 1940, p. 141.

17 Leon Trotsky, The New Course, New York, 1943, p. 92.

18 See pp. 9, 15-16, 44, 96-117, 122.

19 D. Ryazanoff, Karl Marx, Man, Thinker and Revolutionist, New York, 1927, p. 269.

20 Marx, Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie. Preface.

21 Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program. See p. 25 of this volume.

22 Quoted on pp. 119-120 of this volume.

23 In his marginal notes written on a copy of Bakunin's Gosudarstvennost' i Anarkhia (Statism and Anarchy). Quoted in Max Nettlau's Anarchisten und Sozialrevolutionare, Berlin, 1931, p. 128, and in Letopisi Marksizma, Moscow 1926, Vol. II, pp. 60-102.

24 Marx, Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie, loc. cit.

25 The name of Spartacus is used here merely as a symbol of the revolt of the slaves and for the slaves without broaching the very pertinent question of whether Spartacus and his general staff, had they been victorious, would have established themselves as a new ruling military elite over the ex-slaves after they had become free peasants.

26 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Chapter III.

27 Maxim Kovalevsky, Vospominaniya o Markse i Engelse (Reminiscences about Marx and Engels), Moscow, 1956, pp. 312-313.