ABSTRACT

Second, the same uprooted intellectual naturally became internationalist in feeling. This meant more than that the problems and vicissitudes of any particular country-even of individual national proletariats-did not primarily concern him and always remained on the periphery of his interests. It meant that it was so much easier for him to create the hypernational socialist religion and to conceive of an international proletariat the component parts of which were, in principle at least, much more closely wedded to each other than each of them was to its own co-nationals of a

different class. Anyone could in cold logic have framed this obviously unrealistic conception and all that it implies for the interpretation of past history and for the views of Marxist parties on foreign policy. But then it would have had to contend with all the affective influences exerted by the national environments and could never have been passionately embraced by a man tied to a country by innumerable bonds. No such bonds existed for Marx. Having no country himself he readily convinced himself that the proletariat had none.