At 11:45 PM 6/17/2002 -0300, Alex Nixon wrote: >It's been at least 4 years since I picked up Trotsky and Marx, so my >recollection of those two is a bit fuzzier. I seem to remember that I did >not like them much, as I found them to be slightly dry and >cumbersome. But as I said, it's been a few years and many books since them. Marx suffers from having been born German, although in spite if this there are moments of brilliance. As for Trotsky, well, here a few of my favorites: A revolution is always distinguished by impoliteness, probably because the ruling classes did not take the trouble in good season to teach the people fine manners. Those who lose by a revolution are rarely inclined to call it by its real name. Nature, who was not thoughtful enough to arm the majority of men with rhinoceros skin, also endowed the soldier with a nervous system. Revolutions serve to remind us from time to time of this carelessness on the part of nature. ...That is the moral of the opponents of violence in politics: they renounce violence when it comes to introducing changes in what already exists, but in defence of the existing order they will not stop at the most ruthless acts. In practice a reformist party considers unshakable the foundations of that which it intends to reform. It thus inevitably submits to the ideas and morals of the ruling class. Technique is noticed most markedly in the case of those who have not mastered it. The human word is the most portable of all materials. Anarchism [is] a theory very sweeping in its verbal negations, but lifeless and cowardly in its practical conclusions. In the language of biology, one might say that the historical law is realized through the natural selection of accidents. Great revolutions deprive the property-holders even of the privilege of dignified hypocrisy.