 So, let's meet some of Mr. Verloc's friends. There's Michaelus, or Michaelus, I'm not certain how to pronounce that, speaking in an even voice, a voice that weathed as if deadened and oppressed by a layer of fat on his chest. He had come out of a highly hygienic prison, round as a tub, with an enormous stomach and distended cheeks of pale, semi-transparent complexion, as though for 15 years the servants of an outraged society had made a point of stuffing him with fattening foods. That's the great oppression for which these guys are trying to destroy society. This chapter actually opens with Michaelus reading, and the little passage that he reads reminds me of another criticism of Marxism by Ludwig von Mises. He says that Marx had no rebuttal to the economists of his time. He was kind of able to corrupt and adopt like Smith and Ricardo a little bit, but they were already in their graves. The economists of his time had many objections to Marx, and so according to this Mises criticism, I believe it's in the book, Theory and History, or is it called Philosophy and History? I think it's called Theory and History. Mises makes the case, the very strong case in my opinion, that Marx invented dialectical materialism so he could dismiss the economists saying that all human thought is the result of your material conditions. He never reconciled this with his own undeniably bourgeois background, but he said all thoughts and all words and everything is the result of material conditions. Therefore, if an economist is criticizing this, he's just an agent of his social class and doesn't even deserve to be dealt with. And there was a sort of anti-economics that Ludwig von Mises writes about just this insistence on just not addressing economics and not trying to envision or explain how a socialist society would work. Instead, there was just criticism of the status quo and almost nothing else. So here, this little passage of Michaelis kind of reminded me of that. Capitalism has made socialism and the laws made by the capitalism, it says the capitalism, for the protection of property are responsible for anarchism. No one can tell from what, no one can tell what form the social organization may take in the future than why indulge in prophetic fantasies. At best, they can only interpret the mind of the prophet. I guess they're referring to Marx although they don't do so explicitly. There's another page in here and I didn't find it as I was preparing, but without any sense of irony, Michaelis, who is so fat that he runs out of breath just talking to people, he makes a reference to the well-fed rich having to protect themselves against the starving proletariat without any sense of irony. Anyway, the next friend of Mr. Verlox we meet in this little circle is Mr. Carl Yund, Carl Yund, hears him talking. I have always dreamed, he mouth fiercely, of a band of men absolute in their resolve to discard all scruples in the choice of means strong enough to give themselves frankly the name of destroyers and free from the taint of that resigned pessimism which rots the world. No pity for anything on earth including themselves and death enlisted for good and all in the service of humanity. That's what I would have liked to see. Then he argues with Michaelis on whether they should be pessimistic or optimistic or logical. Mr. Yund's nickname is the terrorist. The famous terrorist had never in his life raised personally as much as a little finger against the social edifice. He was no man of action. He was not even an orator of torrential eloquence. With a more subtle intention he took the foam or he took the part of an insolent and venomous evoker of sinister impulses. The shadow of his evil gift clung to him yet like the smell of a deadly drug in an old vial of poison emptied now, useless, ready to be thrown away upon the rubbish heap of things that had served their time. Beautiful writing. There's a comrade Alexander Ossipon. His nickname is the doctor because he had once been a medical student, but he dropped out. Here Michaelis, this goes back to the absurdity of dialectical materialism at least as criticized by Ludwig von Mises the idea that everything is the result of material conditions. There's a very small contradiction in this paragraph which I think demonstrates the contradiction that Mises was pointing to in his criticism of Marx. Michaelis is talking, revolutionary propaganda is a delicate work of high conscious. It is the education of the masters of the world. It should be as careful as the education given to kings, one of the classes they're trying to overthrow, but nevertheless. And then he says, for history is made with tools, not with ideas.