this reality should be recognized as the work of our own hands. Not to see it as this--to regard it as something natural or inexplicable, independent of our own activity--is what Marx calls alienation. He means the condition in which we forget that history is our own production, and come to be mastered by it as by an alien force.

The Bolshevik revolution was made not by a secret coterie of conspirators but by individuals openly elected in the popular, representative institutions known as soviets.

They could fulminate against upper-class parasites and the idle rich in ways which could be mistaken by the politically unwary as genuinely radical.