ABSTRACT
The century since the Communist Manifesto pronounced the "downfall of the bourgeoisie and the victory of the proletariat equally inevitable" have not dealt kindly with Karl Marx's predictions. When Marx undertook to analyze industrial society and lay bare its "law of motion" and its destiny, he saw it heading towards immediate and total catastrophe. The twelve years remaining to him after Marx's death he spent largely in activities that can only be described in Lenin's language as "social pacifism"—an earnest effort to use the international socialist movement to avert the calamity. In place of the polarization Marx had predicted, the very opposite has occurred. Marxism attracts, as Henri de Man wrote of its attraction for him, because it seems "as certain as science, as integral as religion." Hebraic prophecy and Hebrew-Christian chiliastic expectations are syncretised with the worship of that Faustian demon of an earlier age which became the fashionable deity of nineteenth-century worship: Science.
