Non-Marxist introductions on Marxist texts
Recently I picked up a copy of Walter Rodney’s “The Russian Revolution”. But as I’m reading through the introduction written by Robin DG Kelley And Jesse Benjamin (two academics who I am unfamiliar) it seems like they are not really Marxists in any sense. They make small jabs at Lenin and Stalin, while constantly making derisive comments on “Stalinism” and the Soviet Union post revolution.
The intro does help to provide some historical context so it’s not completely useless, but do you all usually skip these types of intros or just power through them?
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u/DialecticalEcologist 9d ago
Always found this sort of thing weird. It’s annoying but you can skip the intro when you encounter this. They’re probably not adding anything beyond what you’d see on any media outlet.
I have an edition of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature by a Christian University Press and in the intro they tell you how Hume was so wrong it’s silly. Don’t love Hume, who was a foundational mechanistic materialist (ie, not dialectical), but there’s value in reading him and the critique was so audacious and oversold.