Fredriech Engels

Winston Churchill once described the Soviet Union as a ‘puzzle wrapped inside an enigma’. The same could be said for Russian President Vladimir Putin today. From the intricate and sometimes unpredictable diplomatic maneuvers of his foreign policy to his contradictory and sometimes ambiguous pronouncements on the legacy of the USSR, enigmatic is perhaps one of the most apposite words to describe him. This enigma is particularly evident in his approach to the politics of the Middle East and Israel in particular.

In their article “Revisiting Marx and Liberalism,” the authors, Edward Martin and Mateo Pimentel, repeat the old myth that “socialism for Marx is the first stage of communism.”

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published the Manifesto of the Communist Party in 1848. By no means did Marx and Engels set out to read the fortune of future capitalist societies, or to develop some high-resolution photograph of future international political economy amongst states. Nor did they predict the various incarnations of communism that would arise after their time. Instead, the manifesto was a commissioned work; its intention was to communicate the purposes and platform of the Communist League, an international political party started in 1847 London.

Chapter Three of State and Revolution is devoted to Lenin’s commentary on Marx’s analysis of the 1871 Paris Commune. It is divided into five parts. This article deals with the first part of the chapter:
1. What Made the Communards Attempt Heroic?