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"Lenin loved people only 'in general,' the self-exiled writer Maxim Gorky nicely summarized in a short book in 1924. 'His love looked far ahead, through the mists of hatred.' Molotov, who worked intimately with both Lenin and Stalin, would famously judge Lenin 'the more severe' and 'harsher.' Lenin had liked to see himself as Marx's equal (once, when a factory worker asked him for a photograph as a memento of their meeting, Lenin pulled from his pocket a small badge with Marx's portrait). But although Lenin's and Marx's portraits in giant size hung side by side on Red Square for the major holidays, many were calling Marx the theorist, and Lenin the (mere) practitioner. It was Stalin who would resolve their equality." Stpehen Kotkin   "Up to two years ago I tried, by stretching Marxist teachings, to bring them into accord with practical realities. Characteristically, or if you wish understandably, I fully realized the impossibility of such tactics when I gave a lecture at the Fabian Society on the subject, 'What Marx really taught,' about a year and a half ago. I still have the manuscript of that talk; it is a frightening example of a well-meaning rescue attempt. I wanted to save Marx; I wanted to show that he had predicted everything that had and had not happened. When I got through with my 'artistic performance,' when I read my lecture over, the thought flashed through my head: You are doing Marx an injustice, what you are spouting about is not Marx." Eduard Bernstein   "Sure, Marx wrote about economic upheavals; so did lots of people. What he never managed to do was offer either a comprehensible explanation of why such upheavals happen or any suggestions about what to do about them (except abolish capitalism). By my reckoning, Karl Marx made about as much of a contribution to economics as Zeppo Marx made to comedy. Or as John Maynard Keynes more elegantly put it, 'Marxian Socialism must always remain a portent to the historians of Opinion—how a doctrine so illogical and so dull can have exercised so powerful and enduring an influence over the minds of men, and through them, the events of history.'" Paul Krugman   "Only in one sense does Voegelin say that 'the situation of political science has changed.' In the modern world, there has emerged an insistence on prohibiting certain questions. While in the ancient world there certainly existed a resistance to philosophical analysis, the difference that occurs in the modern world is the advent of certain thinkers who 'know that, and why, their opinions cannot stand up under critical analysis and who therefore make the prohibition of examination of their premises part of their dogma.' The example he points to as most typical is Karl Marx's prohibition of questioning as it appears in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 in which he discusses the tendency to seek to determine the origin of man—or, as Marx puts it, to ask 'Who begot the first man, and nature as a whole?' But, Marx asserts, these questions results from an abstraction from man nature. He commands that those who would ask these questions 'Give up your abstraction, and you will also give up your question.' This forbidding of certain questions, Voegelin asserts, is a new feature in the modern age, and can be seen in virtually all of the systems constructed by Hegel, Nietzsche, Comte, and others." Shaun Rieley   "For Marx, capitalism meant the greatest alienation, the sufferings of many generations, and nevertheless he accepted these sufferings as the necessary price for progress; he constantly stressed in Capital that 'collective laborer' develops at the expense of 'individual laborer,' but he saw this process as creating the preconditions for socialism. He rejected and ridiculed the view that living people should not be sacrificed for the sake of future paradise, referring to such a view as 'sentimental,' 'utopian,' or 'reactionary.' Both he and Engels seemed sometimes delighted in emphasizing that history must be cruel, that the price for progress, whatever it is, must be paid. 'History,' wrote Engels to a Russian populist, 'is among the most cruel of all goddesses'; progress, wrote Marx, resembles 'that hideous pagan idol' who 'drinks the nectar from the skulls of the slain.' It will cease to be so, but not now, only after the final victory of the world socialist revolution. Is it necessary to 'dot the i' and to say that such habits of thought are especially dangerous in the situation where a revolutionary vanguard has seized power and feels responsible for doing everything to realize the final goal of history?" Andrzej Walicki   "The man who said that the workers had no fatherland disbelieved the evidence of his own country, and died before the intensifying nationalism (as well as the economic conflicts) of the early twentieth century led to what can be more fittingly called the Second Fall of Man, World War I, than any other historical event. Marx ignored all the psychological forces of pride, tradition, cultural autonomy that may lead people to resist modernization and Westernization. One may wonder if the fetish of national independence was worth the nine million lives lost in consequences of the departure of the British Raj, and cite the complaints of the Sikhs, Moslems, Sinhalese, Tamil minority ethnic groups today, that they are less safe in their lives and prosperity since the British left. It would still not serve as a justification for imperial rule imposed on a people that does not want it. Perhaps the best answer to Marx's tribute to the progressive character of British rule was made by an Indian patriot and jurist addressing his British colleagues: 'Yes, you gave us law and justice, roads, public hygiene and hospitals, museums, parks and much else. But you took away what we now value much more, our sense of self-respect.'" Sidney Hook   "If Marx viewed Trémaux's work as 'a very important improvement on Darwin,' it was because 'progress, which in Darwin is purely accidental, is here necessary on the basis of the periods of development of the body of the earth.' Virtually every follower of Darwin at the time believed he had given a scientific demonstration of progress in nature; but though Darwin himself sometimes wavered on the point, that was never his fundamental view. Darwin's theory of natural selection says nothing about any kind of betterment—as Darwin once noted, when judged from their own standpoint bees are an improvement on human beings—and it is testimony to Marx's penetrating intelligence that, unlike the great majority of those who promoted the idea of evolution, he understood this absence of the idea of progress in Darwinism. Yet he was just as emotionally incapable as they were of accepting the contingent world that Darwin had uncovered." John Gray   "Marx thought that the principal conflict to be found in economic life, at any rate in industrialized countries, was the deep disparity of interests between owners and employees, but this is a secondary kind of conflict. If one accepts Marx's conception, then revolution should occur (as indeed he expected) in the most industrialized societies, rather than in economically backward and stagnant countries. Also, if one accepts his conception, much of the behavior of labor unions becomes impossible to understand. In real life, unions, once they have become institutionalized, can successfully deal with employers; and the interests of the two, to a large extent, then coincide. It is to the interests of construction workers that a great deal of construction be undertaken, and if this hurts other workers by wiping out the businesses to which their jobs are attached, so much the worse for them. It is also in the interests of labor unions that their industries should not change technologically; this, of course, often puts unions in conflict with employers—but even more so, in conflict with the interests of industries (and workers in those industries) that produce new technological devices. The inherent solidarity of the working class is an economic fiction." Jane Jacobs   "The proletariat must carry out a revolution to seize the state—that is the heroic method. In our opinion, once it has seized the state it must immediately destroy it as the eternal prison of the masses. According to Marx's theory, however, the people not only must not destroy it, they must fortify it and strengthen it, and in this form place it at the complete disposal of their benefactors, guardians, and teachers—the leaders of the communist party, in a word, Marx and his friends, who will begin to liberate them in their own way. They will concentrate the reins of government in a strong hand, because the ignorant people require strong supervision. They will create a single state bank, concentrating in their own hands all commercial, industrial, agricultural, and even scientific production, and will divide the people into two armies, one industrial and one agrarian, under the direct command of state engineers, who will form a new privileged scientific and political class." Mikhail Bakunin   "Looking back, it seems to me that the interest in Marx taken by myself and my friends was more psychological than political; we were interested in Marx in the same way that we were interested in Freud, as a technique of unmasking middle-class ideologies, not with the intention of repudiating our class, but with the hope of becoming better bourgeois; our great error was not a false admiration for Russia but a snobbish feeling that nothing which happened in a semi-barbarous country which had experienced neither the Renaissance nor the Enlightenment could be of any importance: had any of the countries we knew personally, like France, Germany or Italy, the language of which we could speak and where we had personal friends, been one to have a successful communist revolution with, as it now seems probable, the same phenomena of terror, purges, censorship etc, we would have screamed our heads off." Wystan Hugh Auden   "A novel does not assert anything; a novel searches and poses questions. I don't know whether my nation will perish and I don't know which of my characters is right. I invent stories, confront one with another, and by this means I ask questions. The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place. In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties." Milan Kundera   "Censorship does not abolish the struggle, it makes it one-sided, it converts an open struggle into a hidden one, it converts a struggle over principles into a struggle of principle without power against power without principle." Karl Marx   "A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain, or but a very insignificant one; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighboring palace rises in equal or even in greater measure, the occupant of the relatively little house will always find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls." Karl Marx   "In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature." Karl Marx   "Every provisional state set up after a revolution requires a dictatorship, and an energetic dictatorship at that." Karl Marx   "The principle of utility was no discovery of Bentham. He simply reproduced in his dull way what Helvétius and other Frenchmen had said with esprit in the eighteenth century. To know what is useful for a dog, one must study dog-nature. This nature itself is not to be deduced from the principle of utility. Applying this to man, he that would criticise all human acts, movements, relations, etc., by the principle of utility, must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch. Bentham makes short work of it. With the driest naiveté he takes the modern shopkeeper, especially the English shopkeeper, as the normal man. Whatever is useful to this queer normal man, and to his world, is absolutely useful. This yard-measure, then, he applies to past, present, and future. The Christian religion, e.g., is 'useful,' because it forbids in the name of religion the same faults that the penal code condemns in the name of the law." Karl Marx   "Lenin was more hostile to the capitalist mode of distribution (market exchange) than to capitalism as a mode of production because the latter could assume the form of rationally controlled state capitalism, while the former was in his view the epitome of anarchy, uncontrollability, and dependence on blind, quasi-natural spontaneity. But the same is true of the founders of Marxism. To put it briefly, Marx conceived of freedom as conscious, rational control over economic and social forces. The main enemies of such freedom were the 'blind forces' of the market; freedom would only be realized by rational planning, by liberating people from objective dependence on things and alienated social forces. Hence he was inevitably more hostile to the market than to capitalism as a system of large-scale factory production: the capitalist factory was for him a great step forward to rational planning and organization, while the market was synonymous with anarchy and blind necessity." Andrzej Walicki   "In a society of ever richer, more varied, more productive, more self-defined, and more satisfying lives, they cry 'alienation.' In a society that has liberated women, racial minorities, religious minorities, and gays and lesbians to an extent that no one could have dreamed possible just fifty years ago, they cry 'oppression.' In a society of boundless private charity, they cry 'avarice.' In a society in which hundreds of millions have been free riders upon the risk, knowledge, and capital of others, they decry the 'exploitation' of the free riders. In a society that broke, on behalf of merit, the seemingly eternal chains of station by birth, they cry 'injustice.' In the names of fantasy worlds and mystical perfections, they have closed themselves to the Western, liberal miracle of individual rights, individual responsibility, merit, and human satisfaction. Like Marx, they put words like 'liberty' in quotation marks when these refer to the West." Alan Charles Kors   "Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and then misapplying the wrong medicines." Groucho Marx   "There is no more splendid time to enter this world than the present. Come the day when people can travel from London to Calcutta in a week, both our heads will long since have rolled or started to roll. And Australia and California and the Pacific Ocean! The new world citizens will be unable to comprehend how small our world once was." Karl Marx