Jules Guesde

Jules Guesde

Jules Basile Guesde (November 11, 1845 – July 28, 1922) was a French socialist journalist and politician.

Guesde was the inspiration for a famous quotation by Karl Marx. Shortly before Marx died in 1883, he wrote a letter to Guesde and Paul Lafargue, both of whom already claimed to represent "Marxist" principles. Marx accused them of "revolutionary phrase-mongering" and of denying the value of reformist struggles. This exchange is the source of Marx's remark, reported by Friedrich Engels: "ce qu'il y a de certain c'est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste” (“what is certain is that, I myself am not a Marxist”).

Read more about Jules Guesde:  In The Early Movement, Leader of The Intransigents, Later Life, Legacy

Famous quotes containing the word jules:

    They’re semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own, like those Jules Verne airships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing.... Semiotic ghosts. Fragments of the Mass Dream, whirling past in the wind of my passage.
    William Gibson (b. 1948)