According to marxists.org:
“Confessions” were semi-jocular questionaires that were very popular in Victorian England, and filling them out a common passtime in many families, including Marx's, where friends and relatives participated.
Your favourite virtue … Simplicity
Your favourite virtue in man … Strength
Your favourite virtue in woman … Weakness
Your chief characteristic … Singleness of purpose
Your idea of happiness … To fight
Your idea of misery … Submission
The vice you excuse most … Gullibility
The vice you detest most … Servility
Your aversion … Martin Tupper
Favourite occupation … Book-worming
Favourite poet … Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Goethe
Favourite prose-writer … Diderot
Favourite hero … Spartacus, Kepler
Favourite heroine … Gretchen [Heroine of Goethe's Faust]
Favourite flower … Daphne
Favourite colour … Red
Favourite name … Laura, Jenny
Favourite dish … Fish
Favourite maxim … Nihil humani a me alienum puto [Nothing human is alien to me, (Terence)]
Favourite motto … De omnibus dubitandum [Everything must be doubted].
Some cool/interesting answers in there. I like getting a glimpse at the personalities behind the theoretical works. There is the somewhat “yikes” answer of favourite characteristic of a woman being “weakness” in there, sorry Karl you posted cringe :cringe:
I like that his favourite colour was red :mao-aggro-shining: and it’s cute that he answered “favourite names” with his daughters names.
Your favourite virtue in woman … Weakness
Your idea of misery … Submission
The vice you detest most … Servility
:curious-marx:
Forward this to 10 people who you think will have fun filling it out or you will get bad luck for the next 3 months!!1!!
The only bad answer he gave was 'weakness' otherwise this is pretty rad.
Sorry Karl tho I can't help that I'm a badass, no weakness here.
I had a similar experience yesterday reading Stalin's interview by H.G. Wells. you hear so much second-hand rhetoric about someone, and then hearing them speak in conversation finally gives you a flash of what talking to them might have been like
I love that interview. Read it early on in my journey from lib to commie, mainly because I was like “H. G. Wells interview STALIN?” and did a double take, felt like I had to read it. And it’s really dope, definitely something that makes you question the narrative you’ve been fed about Stalin and the USSR for your whole life.
Even if the Americans you mention partly achieve their aim, i.e., reduce these losses to a minimum, they will not destroy the roots of the anarchy which is inherent in the existing capitalist system. They are preserving the economic system which must inevitably lead, and cannot but lead, to anarchy in production.
You heard it here first folx, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin says anarchy will win.
yeah that stuck out to me too— I wonder if this was through a translator and what word he used in the original Russian
I think "anarchy in production" is a concept taken from Engels' Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, and has nothing to do with the ideology of anarchism?
Been a while since I read it, so I could be remembering wrong.
Someone needs to tell that translator this isn't what we mean when we say we want to make Stalin look like an anarchist.
That was cool as fuck. Stalin comes off as a much smarter there then he is often portrayed.
:100-com:, I had always believed the “Lenin/Trotsky were smart, Stalin was just a strongman” narrative, but after reading Stalin’s work over the last few years it’s clear he was just an intelligent as any other Bolshevik. His book on dialectical materialism is great.
Those questionnaires were pretty popular among kids in late 90s Russia.
Yeah that's a good one. That's in the Francis Wheen biography as well. Had alot of letters as source material so you really got a personable perspective.
