man workman to
the _undeveloped state_ of the proletariat in Germany, you flatter the
national spirit and the guild prejudices of the German artisans in the
grossest manner, a method of procedure without doubt the more popular of
the two. Just as the democrats made a sort of fetich of the words, 'the
people,' so you make one of the word 'proletariat.'" John Spargo quotes
this statement in his "Life." Marx, we are told, could use phrases like
"democratic miasma." He never seems to have made the mistake of confusing
democracy with demolatry. Spargo is perfectly clear about this
characteristic of Marx: "He admired most of all, perhaps, that fine
devotion to truth as he understood it, and disregard of popularity which
marked Owen's life. Contempt for popular opinion was one of his most
strongly developed characteristics. He was fond, says Liebknecht, of
quoting as his motto the defiant line of Dante, with which he afterwards
concluded his preface to 'Das Kapital':

'Segui il tuo corso e lascia dir le genti.'"

It is to Marx's everlasting credit that he set the intellectual standard
of socialism on the most vigorous intellectual basis he could find. He
knew better than to be satisfied with loose thinking and fairly good
intentions. He knew that the vast change he contemplated needed every
ounce of intellectual power that the world possessed. A fine boast it was
that socialism was equipped with all the culture of the age. I wonder
what he would have thought of an enthusiastic socialist candidate for
Governor of New York who could write that "until men are free the world
has no need of any more literary efforts, of any more paintings, of any
more poems. It is better to have said one word for the emancipation of
the race than to have written the greatest novel of the times.... The
world doesn't need any more literature."

I will not venture a guess as to what Marx would have said, but I know
what we must say: "Without a literature the people is dumb, without
novels and poems, plays and criticism, without books of philosophy, there
is neither the intelligence to plan, the imagination to conceive, nor the
understanding of a common purpose. Without culture you can knock down
governments, overturn property relations, you can create excitement, but
you cannot create a genuine revolution in the lives of men." The reply of
the workingmen in 1847 to Cabet's proposal that they found Icaria, "a new
terrestrial Paradise," in Texas if yo