Paul took a terrific Jewish idea, combined it with the best Greek philosophy, added his own twist about the earth-shattering importance of Christ’s death, changed and hugely enlarged the target market, founded many groups of Christians throughout the Mediterranean, and used Rome’s networks to spread the religion like wildfire. Perhaps unintentionally–since he expected Jesus to return soon, so presumably felt little need to set up an institution–he was responsible for the emergence of a non-Jewish Christian church and provided the message that made it take off.
All this must make him one of the most influential superconnectors of all time.
Prussia and France, 1818–48, and England, 1849–83
Karl Marx was born in Trier, now part of Germany, in 1818. In the first thirty years of his life, he was, among other things, a philosophy student writing a doctoral dissertation on ‘The Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature’, president of a drinking club at the University of Bonn, a radical journalist, and a would-be fomenter of revolution. In 1848, together with his friend and financial backer Friedrich Engels, he wrote and published The Communist Manifesto, perhaps the most innovative and well-written political manifesto of all time. In the same year, he hurried from Belgium to Paris at the invitation of French revolutionaries who had seized power.
Sadly for Marx, the revolution soon collapsed. After a brief sojourn in Cologne–where he started and wrote for a short-lived radical newspaper–and another expulsion from Paris, he and his family finally settled in three shabby rooms in central London’s Dean Street. Apart from punctuating a hand-to-mouth existence by drinking rather extravagantly, and some gestures towards organising revolution throughout Europe, Marx spent much of the rest of his life reading and writing in the British Museum. His work became increasingly scholarly, complex, unreadable and unread; his quarrels with collaborators and fellow-revolutionaries ever more rancorous; and his health ever worse. Towards the end of his career, the redoubtable Jenny Marx, Karl’s wife and the daughter of a Prussian baron, is said to have lamented, ‘If only Karl had made some capital, instead of writing so much about it.’ In 1867, when the first volume of Das Kapital was published in German to a resounding silence, she said:
There can be few books that have been written in more difficult circumstances…I could write a secret history of it which would tell of many…unspoken troubles and anxieties and torments. If the workers had an inkling of the sacrifices that were necessary for this work…they would perhaps show a little more interest.
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When Karl died in 1883, stateless and intestate, only the faithful Engels and ten other people attended his funeral. Few believed that Marx was a major thinker; he died in obscurity, deeply unfulfilled. Like Jesus of Nazareth, he could have had no inkling of his posthumous fame.
Marx believed that his lifetime had seen a shift from feudalism–rule by landowners over peasants–to an equally class-based but much more dynamic system–rule by the owners of capital, middle-class industrialists and financiers, over the new exploited class, factory workers. The phrase he coined to describe this system was ‘capitalism’. Although this was in many ways a huge improvement on feudalism, increasing wealth and civilisation stupendously, it was a deeply flawed system. Marx said that it unfairly divided the world into a few rich people and a mass of poor ones, and was thereby digging its own grave: ‘the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons–the modern working class’.66
Capitalism could not last, Marx thought, because it brought ever more workers together in factories and cities, and increasingly capital would be concentrated into ever-larger organisations, which needed to squeeze workers’ living standards in order to survive. The workers would not stand for this and would rise up in bloody revolution, probably first in Britain, the world’s leading industrial economy. A communist government would follow, initially imposing ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ and abolishing capital. But this communist state would then ‘wither away’ in a world of free individuals, able for the first time in history to exploit their full talents for the benefit of themselves and society.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that Marx’s diagnosis of the transition from feudalism to capitalism was wholly original, brilliant and broadly correct. A large working class, concentrated in ever-larger cities, did emerge and eventually grow more powerful.67 But just when Marx predicted revolution throughout Europe, in the second half of the nineteenth century, revolutions became increasingly rare and unsuccessful. There were two main reasons for this: the failure of the revolutionaries to build a large network of committed followers; and, more fundamentally, in direct contradiction of Marx’s thesis, capitalism delivered ever-higher living standards for the workers, who overwhelmingly supported socialist or social-democratic parliamentary reform rather than communist revolution on the streets.
But, as we all know, that was not the end of the story. Just as the Jesus movement would probably have disappeared without the efforts of St Paul, so ‘Marxism’ would not have triumphed without a similar transformation, again largely the work of one man.
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (1870–1924) was born in the Russian Empire near the Volga River, the son of a prosperous schoolmaster. When he was seventeen, Vladimir’s elder brother Alexander was arrested and hanged for plotting the overthrow of Tsar Alexander III. Ulyanov was a first-rate student and later a successful lawyer, but he became increasingly interested in the work of Karl Marx. When he was twenty-five, he was arrested for revolutionary activity and imprisoned for fourteen months.
Ulyanov, who renamed himself Lenin, had two great virtues as a revolutionary. First, he repositioned the geographical focus of Marxism and the whole revolutionary movement. He concurred with Marx’s analysis of the inevitability of revolution and the moral and practical weakness of capitalism, but he changed the locus of intended revolution from Western Europe to Russia. Just as Paul made Greeks and Romans, rather than Jews, his main target group, so Lenin worked indefatigably to identify the cause of revolution with peasants as well as factory workers. The workers were not going to do the job alone, so the peasants had to be roped in–Russia was a backward, agricultural country with only limited industry. Through tortured logic, Lenin formulated his ‘law of uneven development’, which said that capitalism would break down ‘at its weakest link’, which happened to be in underdeveloped Russia. A Russian revolution would then become the signal for the workers’ revolution throughout Europe.
Lenin’s second great attribute was his organising skill. In 1903, he formed the Bolshevik revolutionary party, consisting solely of professional revolutionaries, not mere sympathisers, and organised into a network of local cells, much like Paul’s house-cells of early Christians. In 1905, when revolution broke out in Russia, Lenin and his fellow-Bolsheviks took the lead. But the revolution failed, and Lenin fled to Switzerland.
Early in 1917, however, the Russian Empire of Tsar Nicholas II was exhausted by three years of terrible war against Germany. Revolution flared again, and this time the regime was overthrown. Lenin, still in Switzerland, rushed to get home, and he arrived by train at the Finland Station in Petrograd, the major industrial city of Russia. There he received a tumultuous reception, and immediately set about undermining the new social-democratic government. He coined the slogan ‘Peace, Land, Bread’–note the appeal of ‘land’ to the peasants, the great majority of the population. On the night of 7–8 November 1917, Lenin and the Bolsheviks staged a coup d’état: their forces stormed the Winter Palace and deposed the government. Lenin then seized the reins of power and jailed opposition leaders. Within a month, he had set up the Cheka secret police, which imposed his will through terror.