[PEN-L:2180] Re: Malcolm X

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

When I went to the SU, I got
these big picture books of
Lenin's life and Engels" life.
There didn't seem to be any
on Marx. I was like, "Isn't it
MARXism ? " I thought
it must have been anti-
Semitism.

I got a lot of little Lenin pins too.

Charles Brown

>>> "Rosser Jr, John Barkley" <rosserjb@xxxxxxx> 01/14 4:24 PM >>>
Jim,
     _State and Revolution_ was very approved in the old
USSR and probably Lenin's most widely read and cited work
there, easily exceeding anything by Marx who had more
forbidden works than did Lenin.  Actually, among political
economists in those days it was pretty hard to get anything
published if you failed to quote dear old Vladimir
somewhere and somehow, however irrelevantly.  No such
requirement existed for quotations by Marx.
      My favorite bit of Lenin worship was the fact that
you could get little red star plastic pins that contained
pictures of Lenin as a youth looking a young genius with a
full head of hair.  Of course such pins with Lenin's face
as an adult were much more ubiquitous, and far more
common than those of Marx which were not so easily
obtained.  My, those were the days, :-).
Barkley Rosser
On Thu, 14 Jan 1999 12:53:50 -0800 Jim Devine
<jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> At 02:24 PM 1/14/99 -0500, you wrote:
> Charles Brown writes:
> >Lenin , himself, is one that the oppressing
> >classes have trouble turning
> >into a harmless icon even after
> >his death. That's how
> >tough he was.
>
> If I remember correctly, Lenin's image has been used in some ads to sell
> watches. But since he's a "foreigner," he would never be used in the "West"
> as an icon. On the other hand, back in the days of the U.S.S.R. R.I.P.,
> Lenin was "canonized" there by the state-party bureaucracy. His statues
> were everywhere, despite the fact that Lenin himself didn't want any
> statues to be made of him (among other things, because they attract pigeons).
>
> The fact that he was made into a harmless icon can be seen in the way he
> was used as a symbol of authority and of Mother Russia. Further, a friend
> who was there in the 1970s said that a student or scholar could easily get
> into to trouble if one read and quoted non-approved works by Lenin, such as
> THE STATE AND REVOLUTION.
>
> Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx &
> http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html
>

--
Rosser Jr, John Barkley
rosserjb@xxxxxxx