After karl marx and Friedrich Engels pased from the scene, their heirs fell to quarreling among themselves over the heritage they left behind, the body of doctrine known as Marxism. Some said the heritage belonged to them, since they understood best what the founding fathers taught about socialism and the revolutionary seizure of power by the working class to set up its own dictatorship of the proletariat. Others staked out their claims as the true and legitimate heirs by citing different verses, sometimes from the same chapters, proving Marx and Engels had merely outlined an evolutionary path for the parliamentary road to the goal. Each reviled the other, and the battle of the quotations continued right up to and including World War I, when Lenin put an abrupt halt to the “phrasemongering” and, with the aid of the German General Staff and some soldiers with bayonets, delivered a mortal wound to the pious dreams of a peaceful transition to socialism.
Marxism, One Hundred Years in the Life of a Doctrine, by Bertram D. Wolfe. Dial, $6.95
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