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In 1875, some years before his death, Karl Marx declared: "one thing is certain, I am not a Marxist." And yet the foundation which Marx laid with his "Communist Manifesto" in 1848 was not only the basis of seventy two years of communism in Russia, but laid also the foundation of most contemporary socialist movements.
What was then so special about Marx's teachings, at a time when a number of political thinkers were expounding similar theories? Most likely people listened to his ideas due to hi intransigence, his conception of history as economic sequences, and his strong belief that all human relations are economic - a division of mankind between those who own the means of production and those who do not. He proposed that history was a punctuated by inevitable notes in which quantity was transformed into quality, explaining thus revolutions, wars and sweeping discoveries. Marx advanced the idea of surplus value attempting to replace profit; or rather the certitude that once capitalism has been swept away government will become superfluous and wither away. Arriving punctually every morning for some 20 years in the Reading Room of the British Museum in London, Marx had no practical experience of any political action, but wrote his mature work Das Kapital in an atmosphere of studious and scholarly pursuit.
What might he think now, some one hundred years later, that communism has collapsed in most countries yet where, thanks to his analysis, capitalism has transformed itself and acquired a more human face?
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