Comrades

Georg Simmel

If you're interested in what makes a society, then you're interested in the work of sociologist Georg Simmel. He wrote about things like fashion, flirting, the city, psychology, and more. I was his student in Berlin, and although he had a significant influence on my early work—I found his work on the sociology of modern life especially significant—when I became a Marxist, our camaraderie went south.

I felt that Georg became one of the—gulp—bourgeoisie. I really wanted him to believe in objective truths like we Marxists did, but he just went the way of the idealist and began to see everything subjectively. I had no choice but to write essays about how wrong he was.

Max Weber

This German sociologist and his old lady were good friends of mine in my Heidelberg days. Max was one of my biggest supporters. He was always by my side, whether he was giving me a hot meal or trying to secure me a teaching qualification (that was a disaster).

Like Simmel's, Weber's critique of modern society was important to my work. Weber and I believed that the bourgeoisie wasn't always an empty shell. When this class first developed, its members had certain ethical beliefs and a sense of hard work. After a while, the bourgeoisie started to work just to work—they had lost their purpose and lost their harmony in life.

Ernst Bloch

Ernst was one of the era's great revolutionary thinkers, imagining a world where people weren't exploited or oppressed. Can anyone say "utopia"?

I met him in Heidelberg, too. He loved my book History and Class Consciousness when others (ahem, fellow Party members in Germany) didn't, so I have to give him major points for that.

Now, Ernst and I didn't agree on everything. He liked what I had to say about the petite bourgeoisie and capitalism, but he wasn't so keen on my interpretation of Expressionist art. He thought Expressionism was closely allied to fascism, but I disagreed (not that I actually liked Expressionism).

Stefan George

Yet another of my Heidelberg bros. I loved this poet and even wrote an essay praising how he captured the essence of the era. He wrote about how modernity and industrialization had ruined our way of life, and how capitalism had isolated everyone from each other. Stefan composed beautiful elegiac poems out of how society had failed.

Rivals

Joseph Stalin

You all know I became a Marxist in 1918 and then helped found the Hungarian Communist Party. I even wrote a book about how to be a Leninist, for crying out loud. But then Stalin rose to power and things got real.

The situation ain't simple, so hear me out: if you did not obey Stalin, you'd get put on a show trial and, and then you'd get 86ed in one of his purges—or you'd just get 86ed without the trial—so I had to be real careful, recanting a statement here and revising an opinion there just to save my neck. People have criticized me for saving my own skin, but what are you gonna do when Stalin is in your backyard?

Theodor Adorno

You can't win everyone's heart and mind, eh? So Adorno wrote this little work called Negative Dialectics, and wow, was it negative—toward me! Unfortunately, it's hard to ignore this guy's criticism, because he was a very close reader of my work and didn't dismiss it lightly.

Adorno saw a little contradiction in my work, claiming that I was an idealist and a romantic anti-capitalist. According to him, these two positions just don't reconcile. Now, not one to take insults lightly, I famously accused the guy of having "taken up residence in the 'Grand Hotel Abyss,'" which meant that he was living a cushy life while talking it up about the horrors of capitalism. Who's contradictory now?

Jean-Paul Sartre

This French existentialist and I squared off in a debate about Marxism in 1949. It's pretty simple: according to me, you can't be a Marxist and an Existentialist. Sartre quoted Engels and argued that both positions—Marxism and Existentialism—are driven by economic conditions. Oh, really?

I disagreed, because obviously Existentialism is "a bourgeois subjective idealism" (source)—fighting words if there ever were any. Marxists don't have time for ideals; we are living in the harsh realities of history as it's being made.