ABSTRACT
The source of the abiding influence of Marxism must be ascribed to the lasting character of human reactions to social change. The longing for the simple community and the nonindustrial life is a constant source of revolutionary feeling and of the worker’s unalterable opposition to the agent of the change, the capitalist. The problem of the small producer, most commonly the peasant, so brusquely disposed of in the Manifesto, so readily assumed by Marxism to be solved by the very dynamics of industrialization and capitalism, has been both the crux of and the main impediment to the revolutionary appeal of socialism. If the Marxist system as a whole strikes us as something too vast, overpowering, and complicated to exercise an immediate attraction on the minds and emotions of men, then the answer must be found in the character of some of its components.
