For real. Lenin’s introduction to The State and Revolution is evergreen:
What is now happening to Marx’s teaching has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the teachings of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes struggling for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their teachings with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to surround their names with a certain halo for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time emasculating the essence of the revolutionary teaching, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it. At the present time, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the working-class movement concur in this “doctoring” of Marxism. They omit, obliterate and distort the revolutionary side of this teaching, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social-chauvinists are now “Marxists” (don’t laugh!). And more and more frequently, German bourgeois scholars, but yesterday specialists in the annihilation of Marxism, are speaking of the “national-German” Marx, who, they aver, educated the workers’ unions which are so splendidly organized for the purpose of conducting a predatory war!
Certainly a banger way to start! I think it’s easier to appreciate after having read Marx and Engels prior to it, but Lenin is so fiery and darn smarmy with his writing that it’s hard not to love the guy, and State and Revolution in particular is a classic for good reason.
I know that after my death a pile of rubbish will be heaped on my grave, but the wind of History will sooner or later sweep it away without mercy. — Not Karl Marx
Marx for sure. Gotta be the most misunderstood and purposefully distorted writer I have seen
For real. Lenin’s introduction to The State and Revolution is evergreen:
State and revolution was the first real theory I read. Quite the introduction
Certainly a banger way to start! I think it’s easier to appreciate after having read Marx and Engels prior to it, but Lenin is so fiery and darn smarmy with his writing that it’s hard not to love the guy, and State and Revolution in particular is a classic for good reason.
He just wanted us to know that coat making was a very complex and fascinating process and look and what that has wrought!
I know that after my death a pile of rubbish will be heaped on my grave, but the wind of History will sooner or later sweep it away without mercy. — Not Karl Marx