Critics have often been puzzled by the tremendous vitality of this work.  Its predictions have never, despite the claims of the faithful, been fulfilled.  Instead of diminishing, the spirit of nationalism has been intensified tenfold.  In nearly every respect Marx’s predictions concerning the evolution of historical and economic forces have been contradicted by events, culminating in the great war.  Most of his followers, the “revolutionary” Socialists, were swept into the whirlpool of nationalistic militarism.  Nevertheless, this “Bible of the working classes” still enjoys a tremendous authority as a scientific work.  By some it is regarded as an economic treatise; by others as a philosophy of history; by others as a collection of sociological laws; and finally by others as a moral and political book of reference.  Criticized, refuted, repudiated and demolished by specialists, it nevertheless exerts its influences and retains its mysterious vitality.

We must seek the explanation of this secret elsewhere.  Modern psychology has taught us that human nature has a tendency to place the cause of its own deficiencies and weaknesses outside of itself, to attribute to some external agency, to some enemy or group of enemies, the blame for its own misery.  In his great work Marx unconsciously strengthens and encourages this tendency.  The immediate effect of his teaching, vulgarized and popularized in a hundred different forms, is to relieve the proletariat of all responsibility for the effects of its reckless breeding, and even to encourage it in the perpetuation of misery.

The inherent truth in the Marxian teachings was, moreover, immediately subordinated to their emotional and religious appeal.  A book that could so influence European thought could not be without merit.  But in the process of becoming the “Bible of the working classes,” “Capital” suffered the fate of all such “Bibles.”  The spirit of ecclesiastical dogmatism was transfused into the religion of revolutionary Socialism.  This dogmatic religious quality has been noted by many of the most observant critics of Socialism.  Marx was too readily accepted as the father of the church, and “Capital” as the sacred gospel of the social revolution.  All questions of tactics, of propaganda, of class warfare, of political policy, were to be solved by apt quotations from the “good book.”  New thoughts, new schemes, new programs, based upon tested fact and experience, the outgrowth of newer discoveries concerning the nature of men, upon the recognition of the mistakes of the master, could only be approved or admitted according as they could or could not be tested by some bit of text quoted from Marx.  His followers assumed that Karl Marx had completed the philosophy of Socialism, and that the duty of the proletariat thenceforth was not to think for itself, but merely to mobilize itself under competent Marxian leaders for the realization of his ideas.

From the day of this apotheosis of Marx until our own, the “orthodox” Socialist of any shade is of the belief that the first essential for social salvation lies in unquestioning belief in the dogmas of Marx.