[lbo-talk] Shorris on Strauss

[Carrol Cox]

Let's go a bit further on this. Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Luxemburg, et
al were not revolutionaries because they were Marxists, nor did Marx have
anything to do with their becoming revolutionaries. Nor did Marx, for that
matter,  have anything to do with Cox becoming a revolutionary. But all of
these revolutionaries became Marxist because they were revolutionaries. 

I personally became an anti-capitalist revolutionary before I became a
Marxist. In fact, I was too busy in the '60s to read much Marx or Lenin; I
only got around to reading them in the '70s after things had 'settled down'
and I was girding myself for the long haul. I began calling myself a Marxist
before I know a fucking thing about it; I merely noticed that for a century
or so the major opponents of capitalism had been Marxists. That made me a
Marxists; I became a revolutionary; then that caused me to become a
Marxists; then becoming a Marxist caused me to finally get around to reading
Marx and other Marxists carefully.

And that is just about how it has been with the greater proportion of
communist revolutionaries for the last 100 plus years.

Carrol