> Thomas Seay wrote:
>
> Really? The funny thing I notice about most of the
> people I have met from the former SU, East Bloc, and
> China is that they know damn little about Marx. In
> the case of my wife (Chinese), she was force-fed Mao
Mao, incidentally, knew only the barest smatterings of Marx. He appointed one of his hench-creatures, the inimitable Chen Boda, to write the Chinese CP's official Book of Ideologemes. More proof, as if we needed it, that the total system has no sense of humor.
As Heiner Mueller pointed out, the Eastern bloc states were peasant societies, undergoing autarkic industrialization. Their leaders interpreted Marx exactly the way Frederick the Great interpreted the French Enlightenment: as a summary means to an end.
-- Dennis