ABSTRACT
Marxism now plays little part in the culture of the West, even in France and in Italy where an important minority of the intelligentsia has thrown in its lot with Communism. Marx himself sought to establish the laws according to which the capitalist system functions, maintains itself and develops. Neither the wars nor the revolutions of the twentieth century fit into the theory which he adumbrated. Stalinism aggravated the internal difficulties of Marxism by putting the accent on a vulgar materialism and, even more, by eliminating any pattern of historical evolution. Non-Stalinist revolutionaries imagine a revolution which would break with capitalism just as radically as Bolshevism, but would avoid the decline into bureaucracy, the primitive dogmatism, and the excesses of the Police State. Capitalism precipitates its own ruin by accumulating the means of production instead of allowing an equitable distribution of wealth. The movement which goes from capitalism to socialism became identified with the history of the Bolshevik Party.
