Gray wrote with satire and humor. This was very effective. From the book “The Socialist Tradition, From Moses To Lenin”:
To witness BohmBawerk or Mr. Joseph carving up Marx is but a pedestrian pleasure; for these are but pedestrian writers, who are so pedestrian as to clutch at the plain meaning of words, not realizing that what Marx really’ meant has no necessary connection with what Marx undeniably said. To witness Marx surrounded by his friends is, however, a joy of an entirely different order. For it is fairly clear that none of them really knows what Marx really meant; they are even in considerable doubt as to what he was talking about; there are hints that Marx himself did not know what he was doing. In particular, there is no one to tell us what Marx thought he meant by , ‘value.’ And indeed, what all these conjectures reveal is somewhat astounding, and, one would like to think, unique. Capital is, in one sense, a three-volume treatise, expounding a theory of value and its manifold applications. Yet Marx never condescends to say what he means by ‘value,’ which accordingly is what anyone cares to make it as he follows the unfolding scroll from 1867 to 1894. Nor does anyone know to what world all this applies. Is it to the world in which Marx wrote? Or to an abstract, ‘ pure,’ capitalist world existing ideally in the imagination, and nowhere else? Or (odd as the suggestion may appear) was Marx(probably unconsciously) thinking in terms of medieval conditions? No one knows. Are we concerned with Wissenschaft, slogans, myths, or incantations? Marx, it has been said, was a prophet-albeit a prophet whose ambitions lay in another direction-and perhaps this suggestion provides the best approach. One does not apply to Jeremiah and Ezekiel the tests to which less inspired men are subjected. Perhaps the mistake the world and most of the critics have made is just that they have not sufficiently regarded Marx as a prophet-a man above logic, uttering cryptic and incomprehensible words, which every man may interpret as he chooses.
The most obvious difficulty of the Materialist Conception of History, at least in its less guarded statements, is seen in its helplessness when confronted with the problem of mind, and of the influence of mind on mind. Doubtless great men are conditioned by their environment, but they are certainly not produced by their environment; we all reflect our times. It is easy enough to persuade ourselves that any of the leaders of humanity could have appeared only when he did appear.
It is absurd to assume that any great man was bound to appear at the appropriate juncture. When he was old enough to know better, Engels, in a letter of January 25, 1894, more or less champions this extraordinary view. That Napoleon, ‘just that particular Corsican,’ appeared and did what he did, was an accident, but if just that particular Corsican had failed to turn up, ‘ another would have filled the place’-apparently with equal efficiency. ‘The man has always been found- as soon as he became necessary.’ Presumably the man is also found as soon as he is unnecessary, of whom there are many at large in the world in these latter days. Engels can hardly have thought of the curious theological implications of the view that we all have somewhere our deputy ready to do our work when we are put out of action. It is indeed by no means overwhelmingly obvious that if Hegel and Marx had died in their infancy, the Hegelian philosophy would’ have been produced by someone called Schmidt to give a flavour to the three volumes of Capital, written by some one called Meyer :on the whole, the chances are against it.