Marxist Theory Quotes
There are some who question the authenticity of this Steinbeck quotation on the grounds that all the references to it seem to be secondary sources. However, we lean toward its authenticity.
Ataturk was not receptive toward Communism as some other world leaders were at the time. He saw its weakness far earlier than many others.
He was a strong foe of both Communism and Capitalism. He was one of the first critics to describe the de facto inequality of Communism.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910. Ironically, during the McCarthy period and the Red Scare of the 1950s, some of the right wingers charged that Mark Twain’s writing was “Communist Propaganda”. Most of the accusers had never read most of Train’s work. At the time, the Communists had condemned the racial segregation that was then legal in America and most of the staunch Southern segregationists accused anyone who attacked segregation as a communist. Twain was one of the leading voices against American racism. As for communism, the accusers of Train had probably never read this particular quotation. Twain was an early severe critic of communism and used his favorite weapon—humor—to attack it.
The reason that this quotation is important is that most Americans from the 1920s on concerned with Marxism and communism in the United States, conflated Marxism with Anarchists as if Marxists were anarchists who were bent on violence. In reality, to most Marxists, anarchists were more their enemy than the capitalists. Stalin was then only 28 years old and the Russian revolution was 9 years in the future.
