268 THE CLASS STRUGGLE KARL MARX 269 to make only slow, hardly noticeable progress, as was the case at the time when his Capital was being written, this is no cause for despair. He recognized that the conditions for the realization of the socialist goal are created, as a historical necessity, by the capitalist class, and that these will determine the moment when the eyes of the workers and the expropriated will be opened, when they will be turned into a revolutionary proletariat. The Bourgeoisie, says Marx, produces, above all, its own gravedigger.
In the Communist Manifesto Marx further describes the character of the revolution, and the tools with which these grave diggers will bury the titanic corpse of capitalism forever. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled by the force of circumstances to organize itself as a class, if by means of a revolution it makes itself the ruling class and, as such, sweeps away the force of the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonism, and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.
And at the end of this epochmaking document, which is the more impressive because it was written at a time when capitalism was still in its infancy, it is expressed still more clearly. The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims.
They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.
He who has carefully read and understood Karl Marx will never class him with those well behaved children of polite society who look forward to the revolution as a friendly neighborly afternoon tea, and shudder with holy terror before the actual realization of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
were, in a few particularly sensitive, great and active minds.
But seldom has the embodiment of a new idea found such complete expression in a single person, as when modern Socialism neceived its first concrete expression in the life, thoughts and work of Marx.
The scientific greatness of Marx and the greatness of scientific Socialism can find no better formulation, than that which they received in that pregnant sentence of the Manifesto in its early wording. We do not come to the world with a new doctrine: Here is the truth; fall on your knees before it! We have but evolved new principles from the principles of the world. We do not say Cease your struggles, they are vain; from us you will hear the true message for your struggles! We only show you why you are struggling, and this realization the world must make its own, even against its will.
Therein lies the all conquering power of the ideas that Marx and Engels brought forth into the world. They did not preach Socialism as a doctrine. They held up before humanity a mirror in which it could see itself, its struggles and the causes that brought them forth, Marx did not say: Follow my teachings and you will be happy. He said: Nature and industrial conditions in their inevitable course will force you, willingly or unwillingly, whether you close your eyes to the truth or not, along the path that history has marked out for you.
What Marx was as a thinker, he was as a propagandist, as the fighter for an ideal, for whose clarification and concrete realization he rendered such inestimable service. His practical work as leader of the International Workingmen Association, which is described elsewhere in this magazine by one intimately acquainted with the circumstances, can hardly be separated from his scientific activity. The former was the natural and necessary consequence of the latter. The spirit that conceived and explained the fundamental idea of the Capital was ordained to cry out the thunderous Workers of all countries, unite! into the world.
And this slogan became mighty, became glorious because it so In every age of human progress in the history of every great idea, there occurs the same phenomena. The new idea, the outgrowth of historic and social conditions, slumbers in the unconscious masses of humanity, until it becomes embodied, as it