Lenin T-shirt

"For those who desire not simply an aimless skipping from instance to instance, an integral central movement will take us forward towards a great goal" - Lenin, as quoted on the Philosophy Football T-shirt


Soon after Lenin's death in early 1924, his widow Nadezhda Krupskaya wrote an open letter to the Russian people, published in the party daily Pravda:

I have a great request of you. Do not permit your grief for Ilyich [Lenin] to take the form of external reverence for his person. Do not raise memorials to him, palaces named after him, splenderous festivals in commemoration of him. To all this he attached so little importance in his life, all this was so burdensome to him.

It is not then exactly clear what Lenin himself would have made of the fact that the people at Philosophy Football have designed a T-shirt in his honour. Still, it is to be commended that they have finally got around to paying their respects to the person Georg Lukacs once rightly described as merely 'the greatest thinker to have been produced by the revolutionary working-class movement since Marx', and that they have done so with a quote which suggests at least something of Lenin's commitment to independent working class politics and ideas about the strategy and tactics necessary for socialist revolution...