Karl Kautsky, for example. A follower of Marx, Kautsky did more than systematize Marx’s theories. More learned as a philosopher and more authoritative about Marxism than Marx himself, Kautsky came to be known as the “pope of international socialism”—a touch of irony he and Marx might have savored! And there was Friedrich Engels, of course, who was somewhat more humanistic and certainly more practical-minded than Karl Marx, but not a whit less bitter or less bloody-minded. As a lifelong colleague of Marx and Communist activist, he helped make the penniless Marx financially viable for most of his life. Obscure as they may now be, there were hundreds of others among the “international socialist fraternity” who would be in such a Hall of Heroes. Men such as G. V. Plekhanov and P. B. Axelrod, for example, who pinpointed the masses of workers—the proletariat—as the pivot of any successful revolution, and so set the basic lines of Lenin’s thinking about a Russian birth for political Marxism.
