ABSTRACT
The decades immediately after Marx’s death in 1883 were years of great socialist organizational and political successes in various European countries, seemingly vindicating his ideas and the movement devoted to them. Power became the fascination for all socialist parties, whether Leninist or Social Democratic, just as it was for the bourgeois parties, and their common practice reflected this obsession. There were many reasons for socialism’s failure which cannot be attributed wholly to its lack of intellectual signposts, but the absence of a relevant theory was crucial; its exploitation by ambitious people was another critical factor, one about which Marxist litany was utterly silent when realistic guidance would have been helpful – even if not decisive. Socialists were theoretically underdeveloped when they confronted the great events of the past century, but they were also badly led.
