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Whoever edited/translated this Penguin Classics edition of The State and Revolution is such a turbo-lib, my god. This preface started off fine as a historical context and introduction to what Lenin and the bolsheviks were up to prior to the October revolution but after that it completely falls apart into really blatant revisionism and hard-boiled anti-authoritarian snark that I’ve come to expect from only the most blue-checked among us. I think this is what will get me to skip all these introductory editorials from now on…
This is exactly what happened to me with the spanish version of “The State and Revolution”. A turbo lib did the preface and it was full with anticommunism. I wonder why bother doing a preface then.
Simple. These are warnings for libs. In the unlikely event a lib picks up State and Revolution, they’ll be armed in advance with all the usual thought terminating cliches.
As my wife says, there’s a reason they put it in the beginning and not after everything else!
Lol I started listening to the audible version of the Spanish translation of capital and returned it within about half an hour. I thought the whole thing had been rewritten. Maybe it was only the editor’s intro after all.
This preface is seriously like almost a third of the total length of the text. I subjected myself to way too much of it hoping it would get better before just skipping it. I think all the explicitly Marxist texts have something like this going on; never once did I see stuff like this in Proudhon or Kropotkin.