As he contemptuously observed in a speech at the Halane National Orientation Centre in 1972, narrow-minded orthodox Marxists missed the point when they said 'that Comrade V. I. Lenin confiscated such and such property after the Great October Revolution, or in [the] 1940s Comrade Mao Tse-Tung did this and that in his country against the reactionary forces. These people are totally ignoring the historical context of the teachings of the great socialist thinkers. They recite quotations from the founders of scientific socialism out of their proper context'. In a different setting the same point was made in much the same spirit by a young Somali Marxist intellectual who concluded a heated private debate with a well-known French Marxist anthropologist with the dismissive declaration: 'I don't need Marx; Marx needs me!'

I.M. Lewis, I. M. Lewis, A Modern History of the Som…, loc. 547