ABSTRACT
The earliest Marxists assumed that their doctrine would triumph in fully industrialized and modernized society: by contrast, history has shown Marxism victorious and influential mainly in societies groping their way toward industrialization and modernity. Every society reaching for industrialization and modernization has its “Marxist” period, when the ideas of Karl Marx are relevant to its problems and are reflected in everyday sentiments of the masses of people, even though the name of Marx and his movement may be unknown to them. The origins and the structure of the Marxist system explain much about the spread of Marxism and its offshoots like Communism, a spread that has often taken place in societies and circumstances quite different from those that Marx and Friedrich Engels had assumed would welcome their system. Marx wrote in the midst of and about a revolution that was changing Western society and affecting all parts of the globe—with all its destructive effects on the old orders of Europe.
