Alex Levine’s Reviews > To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism > Status Update

“Karl Marx represented a new, though soon familiar, social type: the déclassé bourgeois intellectual. Not rich or well-borne enough to live a life of social consequence, but content to spend down his inheritance as long as his parents allowed him to.” Indeed, his father complained that he so quickly ran through the money he provided him.

Fascinating point, the "real secret" of Marxism-Leninism was not its historical logic ("immutable law of history"), but that Lenin had shown how revolutionaries could take "exploit the devastation of war to seize power by force."

The emergence of communism in Russia, China, etc. required a “series of world wars that rent the social fabric and put lethal arms in the hands of millions of angry and impressionable young men…communists nowhere came to power through the ballot box…absent the catalyst of war, communist revolution was inconceivable.”