    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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