A while back, Mike posted a quotation from Schickelgrubr, to which I appended a comment promising (threatening?) to post a quotation from Karl Marx. I finally managed to track that quotation down and post it below. Here’s another choice quotation from one of the founders of communism:

«Ce qu’il y a de certain c’est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste.»

(“If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.”)

Wikiquote notes this statement as “quoted and translated by Engels (in an 1882 letter to Eduard Bernstein) about the peculiar Marxism which arose in France 1882.”

As to the exact nature of said “peculiar Marxism”, according to my cursory research, the French socialist leaders Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue (the latter of whom also happened to be Marx’s son-in-law) were claiming to represent Marxist principles, but Marx considered their activities to be mere phrase-mongering which, among other things, ignored the importance of efforts at reform.   For more information, check out Wikipedia’s entry on Marxism, especially under the subheading “Classical Marxism” (which also has its own Wikipedia entry here), or click on the links to Guesde and Lafargue above.

•

Some further thoughts:

To be fair to poor Marx, the context in which the above statement was made is such that a kind of “implied clause” is often inserted, to make it read: “what is certain to me is that [, if they are Marxists, then] I am not [a] Marxist”.

Still, however the above statement by Marx is explained or interpreted, it strongly implies that, even during his own lifetime (he died in 1883), the school of thought Marx was so instrumental in starting that it was was named after him had already strayed very far from its original intent.

One last thing that grabbed my attention: Lafargue, aside from being Marx’s son-in-law, is the author of a book called Le Droit de la Paresse (The Right to be Lazy), about which more here.