This touches on one of the interesting - and, to be honest, appealing - aspects of Marxism: it's at once an "elitist" and a radically egalitarian doctrine. Marx himself made few compromises to appeal to a popular audience; even the Manifesto requires the reading skills of a high-school graduate (according to Microsoft Word's grammar checker, which recommends documents aspire to the 7th or 8th grade level!). Lenin and Trotsky had high cultural expectations for the working class - they wanted proletarians to assimilate the best of bourgeois culture.... Dennis Claxton
-----------------
I've wondered about this while reading Kapital. Who is this text for? How could you write for the working class and expect them to understand this?
The best answer I could come up with was the self taught worker who went home at night and read under the gas light at the kitchen table after the wife and kids were tucked in their beds. Smoking his pipe and meditating on his life with some wine, gin, or tea, a book, turning in late. His heavy body falling into the soft covers and the warmth of his wife. It's not all that bad a life, he said, settling into dreams.
``the best usage book I know of right now is Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage...'' Mike Beggs
There was a day when a bible and a dictionary were the books of a working class and Marx wanted to add a third volumn.
CG