Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by linuskendall 955 days ago
Engels pre-dates Stalin by a considerable period of time and we can assume Stalin has read Engels. Safe to say its Stalin just paraphrasing Engels.
2 comments

And, further, Engels is just paraphrasing Hegel.
Kant etc.
Not safe to say at all, no. It is such an obvious thing to say, and such an easy observation, many people have said something of this nature for a very long time independent of each other. The is basically another phrasing of the question: “how many grains of sand makes a pile?”

I’m not impressed by a cheap observation like this, even when phrased in a clever sounding way. I am impressed when people make new observations when this applies, such as when they are able to model a specific macro system that behaves very differently when the number of inputs is increased by a lot, and show how that is useful for our understanding of nature (including human nature).

Hmm, maybe you could write to Engels to tell him just how unimpressed you are?
I suspect that Stalin read that from Engels. I think that is a reasonable suspicion.