Morbid Pale

When I was a lad In 1906, I joined a band of Bolsheviks.
I read the Manifesto and Das Kapital,
and I even learned to sing the Internationale.

It was in 1907 at the World Congress of the Second International at Stuttgart when Rosa Luxemburg, who possessed an artist’s eye for the characteristic, pointed Lenin out to me with the remark: ‘Take a good look at him. That is Lenin. Look at the self-willed, stubborn head. A real Russian peasant’s head with a few faintly Asiatic lines. That man will try to overturn mountains. Perhaps he will be crushed by them. But he will never yield.’

—Clara Zetkin, Reminiscences of Lenin (1924)

Socialist revolutions can only be democratic ones. It is the ruling class which is the undemocratic minority.

—Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right