arxian
fetish," and, on the other hand, every recognition of the human
fallibility of Marx by a Socialist thinker is hailed as a sure portent
of a split in the movement. Yet the most serious criticisms of Marx have
come from the ranks of his followers--perhaps only another sign of the
intellectual bankruptcy of the academic opposition to Socialism.

Of course, Marx was human and fallible. If "Capital" had never been
written, there would still have been a Socialist movement, and if it
could be destroyed by criticism, the Socialist movement would remain.
Socialism is the product of economic conditions, not of a theory or a
book. "Capital" is the intellectual explanation of the genesis of
Socialism, and neither its cause nor an argument for it by which it must
be judged. Hence the futility of such missions as that undertaken by Mr.
W. H. Mallock, for example, based upon the assumption that attacks upon
the text of Marx will serve to destroy or seriously hinder the living
movement. Like a prophet's rebuke to these critics, as well as to those
within the ranks of the Socialist movement who would make of the words
of Marx and Engels fetters to bind the movement to a dogma, come the
words of Engels, published recently, letters in which he writes
vigorously to his friend Sorge concerning the working-class movement in
England and America. Of his compatriots, the handful of German Socialist
exiles in America, who sought to make the American workers swallow a
mass of ill-digested Marxian theory, he writes, "The Germans have never
understood how to apply themselves from their theory to the lever which
could set the American masses in motion; to a great extent they do not
understand the theory itself and treat it in a doctrinaire and dogmatic
fashion.... It is a credo to them, not a guide to action." And again,
"Our theory is not a dogma, but the exposition of a process of
evolution, and that process involves several successive phases." Of the
English movement he writes, "And here an instinctive Socialism is more
and more taking possession of the masses which, _fortunately_, is
opposed to all distinct formulation according to the dogmas of one or
the other so-called organizations," and again, he condemns "the bringing
down of the Marxian theory of development to a rigid orthodoxy."[96] The
critics who hope to destroy the Socialist movement of to-day by
stringing together mistaken predictions of Marx and Engels, or who think
that Soc