Abstract

In the famous opening sentence of The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx notes that somewhere Hegel had written that great world-historical phenomena occur twice, neglecting to add, however, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Given what we now know of the heretofore hidden side of Bruno Rizzi, still another revision seems in order: sometimes such phenomena make yet a third appearance, this time as embarrassment, rank embarrassment. Indeed, Rizzi's name surfaced in three such sequential contexts. The first was in the late 1930s when non-stalinist Marxists, primarily Trotskyists, were debating whether or not a “new class” had emerged in the Soviet Union