The German Genius

scale” can be achieved only by an act, a revolution . “Only in the activity of revolution itself [does] man make himself into a new man, cleansed and purified.” The division of labor, private property, and intellectual self-understanding of the state are put together “in one arching synthesis.” 41
    The German Ideology was followed by the Manifest der kommunistischen Partei ( The Communist Manifesto ), in 1848, which was even more aggressive in predicting the coming revolution. The League of the Just had been formed in 1836 by German radical workers living in Paris. It was a small secret society dedicated to revolution in Germany. After an unsuccessful uprising in 1839, most of its members left Paris for London where, in 1847, the society’s name was changed to the Communist League. At their annual congress in 1847, the league—riven by factions—commissioned Marx and Engels, recent adherents, to draft a manifesto.
    Engels did most of the work on the draft but then Marx realized this was the perfect vehicle to make known their views to a wider world. In imposing his vision on Engels’s draft, he made the Manifesto a classic “confession of faith.” 42
    He began, famously: “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism.” At the time, says Bruce Mazlish, there were perhaps between twenty and one hundred communists in London, yet Marx treats them as though they are “the only alternative to the status quo.” After this stirring propaganda, Marx provides a grand sweep of history, informing us, with the certainty of a scientist, how the bourgeoisie rose in opposition and, at the expense of the feudal aristocracy, transformed the technology of production and its system of financing, expanded and transformed the market, and created a different civilization, based on international trade and exchange. In doing so, skills came under threat, and so the bourgeoisie “created the conditions of its own doom.” The requirements of the bourgeoisie called into existence the modern working class—the proletarians. “The bourgeoisie has simplified the class struggle, which Marx claims to be ‘the history of all existing society,’ into a final Manichean struggle of only two classes: the haves and the have-nots, the capitalists and the proletarians.” 43 The conflict is almost biblical in its simplicity.
    Given the horrors that have gone on in—or been attributed to—Marx’s name, it only seems fair to point out that, aside from the abolition of property in land and the right of inheritance, Marx’s list of practical measures seems hardly radical today: a progressive or graduated income tax; centralization of credit in the hands of the state; nationalization of communication and transport; the combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; free education of all children. These measures were perhaps overlooked because of the stirring language, the sheer firepower of the drama he claimed to see unfolding all about him, and for his conclusion: “ WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE! …Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.” 44
    And then, there was Das Kapital . There is no question, says Bruce Mazlish, that this book was Marx’s greatest achievement, or that it is a great work. “The question is: in what sense is it a great work?” 45
    Its central ideas are: (1) a labor theory of value, (2) a theory of surplus value, (3) a theory of capital accumulation and its consequences, and (4) a law of “increased misery.” The idea of a labor theory of value was initially conceived not by Marx but by Adam Smith—in fact, it was commonplace in the early nineteenth century and made Marx seem very up-to-date. However, no sooner had Das Kapital been published than another revolution overtook economics: this was the so-called marginal utility theory, a mathematical approach that undermined the labor theory of value and is one reason modern economists pay so little attention to Marx’s economic theories.
    Marx held that all value was created by the laborer, who wasn’t allowed to keep the full value of his work but had part of it—the larger part—expropriated from him, subjecting him to a life of misery and degradation. 46 The central problem, he said, was profit. “If the capitalist gets back the capital he started with, and the laborer gets the rightful value of his work put into the