A summer for Marx

My Marxist summer is getting off to a great start - and I just spent some of my store credit at Raven Books on more stuff to read. I’m enjoying Francis Wheen’s biography of Marx a lot - it’s pretty light-hearted and entertaining, a real book for the beach.

The best quote so far is from Engels, who in his late teens formed a pogonophiles’ club in Bremen to upset the conservative town elders. At the end of the launch party he toasted the club,

“Philistines shirk the burden of bristle

By shaving their faces as clean as a whistle.

We are not philistines, so we

Can let our mustachios free.”