The Personal is Political. The Political is Personal.

 
smelly commentary

Susan Weissman's profile of the late Vlady Kibalchich appears in the September/October issue of Against the Current:

Vlady's mother, Liuba Russokova, was Lenin's stenographer. Lenin was a frequent guest in the apartment at the famous Astoria Hotel in Petrograd. Vlady liked to tell the story of the time Lenin visited, to find the baby Vlady crawling naked. Lenin affectionately picked up baby Vlady, only to find himself bathed in the warm jet of Vlady's urine.

Depending on the audience, Vlady would adjust the story, saying instead "I shat on Lenin."

We are sure that baby Vlady was merely commenting on Marx's discussion of the origin of surplus value in large scale social labor, in Captial Vol. III, Part 1, chapter 5:

We refer to the reconversion of the excretions of production, the so-called waste, into new elements of production . . . . [T]his so-called excretion is thrown back into the cycle of production and, consequently, consumption, whether productive or individual.

posted by TiR at 7:17 AM