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Why and how the Marxist vision attracts many members of this mixed bag may be explained by a quick look back at Marx's Europe of the 1840s, which in today's parlance would be called a "developing area." Its social structure was crumbling under the impact of science and industrialization. Three attitudes toward change were fairly clearly defined: 1) conservative, 2) progressive or, as it was called, "liberal," and 3) revolutionary. Then, as now, thoroughgoing reactionaries were hard to find; nobody seriously tried to restore the pre-industrial Europe. But there were many clingers, people who fought rearguard actions, defending for reasons of interest or sentiment one or another bastion of the pre-industrial past. Against them, the liberals, mainly middle-class and including many intellectuals, carried the fight for science, industrialization, education and the nation-state, promising (recklessly) a tomorrow of peace and enlightenment.
Between those two groups there was no doubt where Marx stood: for science against religion, for industrialism against "the idiocy of rural life," for the new nation-state against the remnants of the old political order. But he regarded the new order, capitalism, as a transient phase that would soon destroy itself and be replaced by a wave that he saw expressed in the third attitude toward the new order, revolution. The liberals, eyes on the future, tended to be insensitive to the suffering, material and psychological, caused by the march of the new order. Marx was not. He believed, incorrectly, as it turned out, that the material condition of the workers must worsen as capitalism developed. But his observations about psychological "alienation" in a changing society have proved much more durable.
Appealing Ambivalence
The revolutionary spirit in Marx's Europe was essentially anarchistic. It was the revolt of men alienated by industrializing change from the land, from their tools, from a sense of their status—however humble—in a society that they understood. Although Marx sympathized with the emotions that called forth this revolt, he recognized anarchism's impotence and fought it bitterly. In his view, nothing could or should stop the march of industrialization and its political and social consequences.
Thus, a key element in the Marxist vision was his effort to channel the anarchistic spirit so that it would be in favor of industrialism but opposed to the capitalists. His intellectual support of the new order fused with his passionate sense of justice to shape a way of being that was simultaneously on the side of progress and in revolt against its present villains who controlled both government and the means of production. This ambivalent way of dealing with the stress of rapid social change retains its appeal for many men today.