From Hans Magnus Enzenberger, a German leftist essayist.""I kept meeting Communists in hotels for foreigners, who had no idea that the energy and water supply in the working quarters had broken down during the afternoon, that bread and milk were rationed, and that the population had to stand two hours in line for a slice of pizza; meanwhile the tourists in their hotel rooms were arguing about Lukács"
Marx's Contribution Karl Marx never unwittingly suffered a tape recorder to be strategically emplaced in some intimate part of his aura. No one spied on him from across the street while he scribbled on endless sheets of paper at his ease. He could even afford the luxury of machinating heroically in his own good time against the prevailing system. Karl Marx never encountered the "obligatory retraction," and he had no reason to suspect that his best friend might be in the pay of the police, nor, even less, was he ever forced to become an informer. He never heard of the queue which forms before the regular queue and gives one the right to be in the queue which waits to find at the head of the line that what was available were replacements for zippers (and: "They're all gone, comrade"). I don't expect he was subject to a law that obliged him to cut off his hair or shave his "anti-hygienic" beard. His times did not require him to hide his manuscripts from Engels' eyes. (Then, too, the friendship between these two homologues never proved a "moral concern" for the State.) If ever he brought a woman to his lodgings, he never had to hide his papers under the mattress nor, for reasons of political expediency, was he forced to deliver a discourse (while caressing her) on the Tsar of Russia or the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Karl Marx could write what he would, come and go from the country, could dream, meditate, speak, scheme, work against the party or power in his time. Everything Karl Marx could do lies in the grave of prehistory. His contribution to contemporary problems has been immense. Reinaldo Arenas