> 1) Why do you assume that if he saw contrary evidence, > he would have corrected himself?� There was plenty of > contrary evidence available in 1883, and it didn't > seem to stop him. > Actually, there wasn't all that much evidence. He did not foresee the rise of the labor union movement. He honestly believed that capitalism could NOT reform even if it wanted to, that the logic of the market would lead capitalism to destroy itself.
In any case, Marx was beginning to have some doubts right before he died, especially about the political movement based on his work. > 2) Why _not_ blame him for what has been done in his > name since he died?� It seems like much of what > happened in his name is a logical outcome of what he > said, after all. > Bullshit. Sorry, but that's what it is to blame the horrors of the 20th century on a man who died in 1883 and who NEVER countenanced violence (The Communist Manifesto was a tract written in the throes of a convulsive year and bears about as much relation to his real work as Woody Allen's "Bananas" does to "The Battle for Algiers"). He never thought revolution would come to a pre-industrial country, he never though it would lead to a single-party dictatorship, he never thought it would lead to the Gulag. I don't see how you can reasonably blame Lenin and Stalin on Marx, who would have been one of the very first to castigate the perversions they caused to his theories. It's almost like blaming Martin Luther for Hitler (which I've seen done). And remember, what Marx was opposed to was not necessarily any better. The Industrial Revolution was the cause of massive human suffering (which Marx believed was unfortunately necessary to create the wealth that the proletariat would later liberate). Just because Lenin was bad does not make Nicholas II good. Just because Castro is bad does not make Batista good. Marx was not a politician or a political theorist. He thought he was a scientific philosopher who had discovered iron laws of history. He was wrong in his prescription for the future - capitalism did prove much more adaptable than he thought - but his analytical technique is not necessarily inaccurate. > � He wasn't Jesus.� You can't argue > nearly as plausibly that the USSR was a perversion of > Communism as you could that the Spanish Inquisition > was a perversion of Christianity. > Of course you can. Marx never expected Russia to be the first country to have a communist revolution. He didn't think it was possible - and, in a sense, he was right. > At what point do we get to say that he was full of it > and move on, really? > His theories turned out to be wrong, but I think he would have realized this and adjusted his theories to take notice of such things as trade unionism, government-sponsored social security programs, the creation of a larger middle class, etc. Obviously we'll never know, but I think it is ahistorical claptrap to blame Marx for the Russian Revolution, which happened 34 years after he died in a country that he never believed could sustain a workers' revolution (and Lenin had to jump through all kinds of theoretical hoops to justify his actions). I don't think he was any more full of it than the "supply side" morons who still won't admit they were pretty much wrong about just about everything. Tom Beck www.mercerjewishsingles.org "I always knew I'd see the first man on the Moon. I never dreamed I'd see the last." - Dr Jerry Pournelle _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
