Found via Harry's Place, Marx Myths and Legends looks a fascinating website and blog that I will definitely have to bookmark for future reference and self-education.
As Andy Blunden - who has already done a lot of excellent work on the Marxist Internet Archive - and Rob Lucas explain in their introduction to the website, part of the purpose of the project is to get people to read and study: " . . . Marx just as you would read anyone else: critically and for yourself, not uncritically or secondhand. Marx Myths & Legends will have succeeded as a project if it at least helps some to begin to study Marx with a strong mistrust for the prejudices, preconceptions and layers of congealed misinterpretation that surround his life and work."
The serious heavyweight writers whose essays are included on the website include Harry Cleaver, Cyril Smith and Hal Draper, but I'm especially pleased to see that the late Maximilien Rubel has an essay posted that has been newly translated from the French* by Rob Lucas.
Rubel, perhaps best known on this blog as co-editor with John Crump of Non-Market Socialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century, was part of that "thin red line" of revolutionaries who rejected both Leninism and Social Democracy. From reading an obituary of Rubel that appeared in the Socialist Standard a few years back - unfortunately not online - I remember getting the impression that Rubel was almost a throwback to the extreme left of the Second International era (the same was said of Lucien Laurat); someone who came to reject the post 1917 orthodoxy that 'Marxism' (yeah, I know, sort of goes against the grain of the website and blog advertised in this post) was somehow incomplete if it was not hyphenated with 'Leninism'.
The following articles from the Socialist Party of Great Britain website can be read in conjunction with the articles listed in the website above: Marx In His Time and Karl Marx's Declaration of Principles.
* There appears to be an excellent webpage devoted to Rubel's work. I say 'appears to be' because it is all in French, and five years of sleeping through French in school means that I can't go much beyond: 'Je m'appelle Darren'. Merde.
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