4
pasted 
together the ideas of his time and came up with the ideology
named after him.
At its birth, the new ideological meme was vulnerable and
powerless.  The only small batch of matter over which it had any
control was the body and mind of Karl Marx, a hundred and fifty
pounds of isolated humanity.3  Marx was not a promising person in
which an idea would wish to start its life.  Though he occasionally
made money as a newspaper correspondent, Marx's work was
definitely not in demand.  He was so foul tempered, so cantankerous,
so subject to turning even the tiniest discussion into a quarrel that he
had few friends and almost no followers.  One of his college professors
said young Marx was always waving his fists in the air in a fury, "as if
a thousand devils gripped his hair."  And one of the many would-be
friends Marx alienated recalled that "the sarcasms with which he
assailed his adversaries had the cold penetration of the executioner's
axe."4
It's little wonder that for the next fifty years, the meme which
had assembled itself in Marx's brain barely stayed alive.  The
conceptual tangle leaped tenuously from one mind to another,
constantly searching for the opportunity to expand its power.  Karl
muttered his ideas to his acquaintances, a few of whom passed them
on to others.  And he preserved them in his book, Das Kapital (1867).
But that book, too, seemed like a poor vessel in which to keep the
struggling meme alive.  Russian censors found the volume utterly
incomprehensible.  As a consequence, these normally repressive
servants of czarist autocracy blithely allowed the importation of the
murky work into their land.5  Most Russians had the same difficulty
understanding the new ideas that the censors had. The result: though
Das Kapital was occasionally passed from hand to hand, Karl Marx's
meme still barely clung to life.
Then, Marx's mental progeny had a modest stroke of luck.  It
found its way into the cerebral substance of a few men capable of
something Marx hadn't been--organization and the recruitment of
followers.  These were Lenin, Stalin and their friends.6  But even they,
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