Page:Karl Marx The Man and His Work.pdf/17

Rh class interests of the proletariat. As stated before, these interests he found were but the logical product of the material conditions underlying capitalist production: conditions which were bound to make the workers conscious of their class interests, and develop to such a climax where the expropriation of the expropriators would become a dictate of historic evolution: where individual social property would give way to social individual property, as the next step in the dialectical process of social development.

Practically fifty years have elapsed since the publication of the first volume of "Capital," and the formulation of the theories just touched upon. And on March 14th of this year it will be thirty-four years since Karl Marx has passed from us. In these days of hurry and scurry, thirty-four years seem a veritable age. How many refutations, corrections, revisions, and annihilations of Marxism were we not compelled to witness in this short span of time? Let me again remind you of the Brentanos, Mallocks, Simkhovitches, Skeltons, Boehm-Bawerks, Bernsteins and consorts. Consider the bulky tomes, highly praised by capitalist journals and professorial fossils, they wrote in their valiant attempt to overthrow the theoretical system of Marx; consider how the combined schools of vulgar-economy have thundered for years against the theoretical premises of this proletarian economist; consider how these henchmen of capital, in the face of irrefutable facts and figures, in the face of undeniable conditions, have sought by intimidation and fraud to ignore, stifle and finally corrupt the economic and philosophical deductions of Marx; consider these events well, and then take an inventory of the results accomplished. You will find that the majority of the "learned" books written to refute Marxism have been relegated into oblivion, or, probably, act as dust absorbers on the shelves of various libraries. Of course, the Mallocks, Skeltons and Boehm-Bawerks are still with us and plying their trade vigorously as ever. Are their theoretical effusions, however, taken as serious as of yore? No, they have neutralized the effect of their theoretical vaporings with the poison of their past idiosyncracies, to