tion of literally hundreds of writers on the subject, by supporters
as well as opponents, by those who have studied it, and by those
who regard a study of it as an unnecessary impediment. What-
ever Marxism may mean to others, Marx himself took pains to
set forth what he considered his own central thought. He made
it clear in 1852 in a famous letter to a party friend, Georg
Weydemeyer, a former Prussian artillery officer who was later
active in the American Civil War as a Northern regimental
colonel:

". . . as for myself, no credit is due me for discovering the
existence of classes in modern society nor yet the struggle between
them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the
historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois econ-
omists the economic anatomy of the classes. What I did that was
new was to prove: (1) that the existence of classes is only bound up
with particular, historic phases in the development of production; (2) that
the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the pro-
letariat; (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the tran-
sition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society."

The old term "dictatorship of the proletariat" has long ago
been discarded by all socialists, understandably and wisely. It
had acquired abhorrent connotations with the rise of the Stalinist
regime, which was nothing but a dictatorship over the proletariat
and against it. Ambiguity and misconception have been re-
duced to a minimum by using the terms "labor" or "socialist"
government. In any case, by that harsh Latinic phrase, Marx
had in mind, as he put it in his classical statement of the Com-
munist Manifesto, "the first step in the workers' revolution [which]
is to make the proletariat the ruling class, to establish democracy."

The value of knowing Marxism is difficult to reject. The
validity of Marxism is not so difficult to reject. It is indeed far
more widely rejected than accepted. And where, as in the
Communist world, it is honored in the word it is outraged in the
deed. It is hardly necessary to go much further than to compare
the reality of the so-called communist societies of today with
what was explicitly set forth as the view of the early communists
of Marx's time. Only a few weeks before Marx wrote his
Manifesto in 1847, the first English journal published in London
by the German communist society which sponsored the Manifesto
declared:

"We are not among those communists who are out to destroy
personal liberty, who wish to turn the world into one huge
barrack or into a gigantic workhouse. There certainly are some
communists who, with an easy conscience, refuse to countenance
personal liberty and would like to shuffle it out of the world

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