how did karl marx influence the world??
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Answer:
Marx’s intellectual influence—but from a very different angle. I will use the counterfactual approach. I would ask what would had been his influence had not three remarkable events happened. Clearly, like all counterfactuals, it is based on personal reading of history and guesswork. It cannot be proven right. I am sure that others could come with different counterfactuals—perhaps better than mine.
The first event: had there been no Engels. This counterfactual had been discussed but it is worth reviewing. When Karl Marx died in 1883, he was the coauthor of The Communist Manifesto, a number of political and social short studies, newspaper articles (in the New York Daily Tribune) and a thick but not well-known or much translated book calledCapital (volume 1). It was published 16 years before his death and during the intervening years he wrote a lot but published little. Toward the end of his life, he even wrote little. Similarly unpublished and in a mess were hundreds of pages of his manuscripts from the late 1840s, and the 1850s and 1860s. Marx was known among the rather small circle of worker activists, and German, Austrian and increasingly Russian social-democrats. Had it remained so, that is, had not Engels spent more than ten years putting Marx’s papers in order and producing two additional volumes of Das Capital, Marx’s fame would have ended at the point where it was in 1883. It would have been rather minimal. I doubt that anyone would have remembered his birthday today (he was born on 5th of May).
But thanks to Engels’ selfless work and dedication (and Engels’ own importance in German social-democracy), Marx’s importance grew. Social-democrats became the largest party in Germany and this further carried Marx’s influence forward. Under Kautsky, The Theories of Surplus Value were published. The only other countries where, within a very narrow circle though, he was influential were Russia and Austria-Hungary.
The first decade of the 20th century saw increasing influence of Marxist thought, so much so that Leszek Kolakowski in his monumental Main currents of Marxism rightly calls it “the golden age”. It was indeed the golden age of Marxist thought in terms of the caliber of people who wrote in the Marxist vein, but not in terms of global influence. For Marx’s thought made no inroads into the Angle-Saxon world (the first English translation of Das Kapital—which is still, strangely, referred to by its German title--was in 1887, that is twenty years after its original publication). And in Southern Europe, including France, he was eclipsed by anarchists and by “petty bourgeois socialists”.
This is where the things would have ended had there not been the Great War. I think that Marx’s influence would have steadily gone down as the social-democrats in Germany