And on its part, German socialism recognized, more and more, its own calling as the bombastic representative of the petty-bourgeois philistine
At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organization of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.
Marx and Engels left no detailed blueprint of what a socialist or communist society should look like, something that led academic Marxists to pronounce that Marx’s originality lay in his philosophy and economics. Others utilized his panegyrics celebrating the revolutionary capacities of capital to argue that the gravediggers were the capitalists themselves
Lenin [...] had insisted the only credible goal was to turn the imperialist war into a civil war. The enemy was at home. Another manifestation of Jacobin voluntarism, his opponents had mocked.
I think this was a very flawed analysis, and it remains so now. It imputes to capitalists a motive and an interest that they’ve never had. Capitalists have always and everywhere had only one interest, which is making profits.
