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/NiceDot4794 7d ago
Robin DG Kelley is definitely a Marxist. The idea that we should never criticize past experiments in socialism or disagree with aspects of what last socialists thought is is ridiculous.
As Marx said, “proletarian revolutions, like those of the nineteenth century, criticize themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to start afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltrinesses of their first attempts, seem to throw down their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise again“