Dedication¶
Core Argument¶
The dedication of this volume is a brief but pointed tribute to Alberto Arregui, known to his comrades as ‘Manu’, who died as the manuscript was being completed. The author frames the book not as an abstract academic exercise but as a work rooted in the lived struggle of the working class, and Arregui is held up as its true protagonist. The dedication asserts that the real heroes of Marxist theory and history are not the celebrated intellectuals or party leaders who dominate official accounts, but the unsung militants who gave their entire lives to the cause of socialism. By naming Arregui’s dates—20 August 1954 to 15 January 2019—the author fixes his comrade’s life in the concrete span of class struggle, refusing to let his contribution dissolve into sentiment. The gesture is also a quiet polemic against the bourgeois tendency to sanitise or individualise revolutionary history; here, the dedication insists that the book’s arguments about mass agency, sacrifice, and revolutionary discipline are embodied in the very person to whom it is offered. The reader is thus warned from the first page that this is a partisan work, written from within the movement and for it, not a dispassionate survey.