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Three Myths About Marx | AIER:
So when did Karl Marx burst into the intellectual mainstream?
It wasn’t until 1917, when an obscure band of revolutionary Marxist intellectuals took advantage of political instability in Russia and staged a coup d’état, seizing control of its government. The Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath almost instantly turned Marx into an intellectual celebrity on the left.
This fact was widely acknowledged at the time, including among other leftist intellectuals. G.D.H. Cole, a non-Marxian socialist from Britain’s Fabian Society, would quip in that until 1917 “Marx’s works lay securely buried in the grave of their author.” “Lenin,” Cole continued, “altered all that. He resurrected Marx, and gave to Marxism a new theoretical context.” On the other side of the Atlantic, W.E.B. Du Bois would similarly remark in a 1933 memoir that “until the Russian Revolution, Karl Marx was little known in America” and “treated condescendingly” by the few academics who even bothered with his work.