“Le style c’est l’homme même.”
—Buffon

Of Karl Marx it might be said, to adapt slightly Rossini’s bon mot about Wagner, that he has his good lines but his bad pages. His good lines are inscribed forever on every reader’s mind, though whether there would have been many such readers had there been no Russian Revolution is perhaps doubtful. At any rate, he was, at his best, capable of memorable formulations.

In his short book Marx’s Literary Style, the Venezuelan poet and Marxist Ludovico Silva, who died in 1988 before the socialist experiment in his country got underway and reduced it to its current misery, examines Marx’s writings from the literary point of view and judges them superlative in every way. He finds Marx’s disdain for, anger against, and pitiless excoriation of others—which is virtually unrelieved by anything other than occasional grudging admiration, and certainly not by tenderness—invigorating rather than frightening. Marx, indeed, might be regarded as a forerunner of the tide of abuse that passes for argument in today’s world, though he was, even at his worst, at a higher level of intellect than most Twitterati.

Silva, whose book has the merit of a lucidity not always to be found in the work of Marxist theoreticians, thanks in no small part to their denial on dialectical grounds of the law of noncontradiction, says that Marx’s style is in complete unity with his thought: there is no division or contradiction between his claim