Dear Yabby,
I carefully read through the wiki-link (when I should be sleeping) and found nothing in there to contradict my position apropos Marx and Marxism as I've sketched it here and on other threads. But I owe you a debt of gratitude for leading me (unwittingly) to one of the best and fairest assessments I've come across on Marx and his thought, within the very wiki-link you provided:
http://www.stanford.edu/~allenw/webpapers/Marxpreface.pdf
It is the new preface to the second edition (2004) of Allen Wood's "Karl Marx"
I urge everyone to read it (including davidf, if you're still about, David).
Marx's thought is not a matter of doctrine for me (nor was it for Marx); it is food for thought (and action. No, not terrorism, a la Bin Laden, but concerted and dogged effort based on a DEMAND for a better, fairer and healthier way to regulate society and fulfil human potential {essence btw is simply that: "potential"}) just as Marx intended.

G A Cohen's criticisms of Marx's philosophy have been effectively refuted btw.

Dear Gilbert,
woolier and woolier.

Dear Squeers,

Yes, I am still around. However, no philosophy or ideology has meaning as an abstraction. It takes shape according to what humans do with it. Marx's opposition to human rights as an excresence of capitalism made his system fatally flawed whatever virtues were in the rest of it. It justified the actions of Lenin and the other criminals in making great mounds of corpses.

You can spin your theories and blame the corpses on capitalism. grok and you are unable to recognise evil. Your rationalisations don't sound too different from the rationalisations of other ideologues who defend other evils. "Those who carried out the inquisition weren't really Christians."

I find the fluency and wit with which evil crap is defended interesting.

Squeers wrote: ‘It is the new preface to the second edition (2004) of Allen Wood's "Karl Marx"’

Is Allen Wood a pseudonym for Woody Allen?

I just finished "A Very Brief History of Eternity" by Carlos Eire who was born and grew up in Castro’s Cuba. The book is not concerned with Marxism, but here are a couple of quotes from it:

"One of the chief assumptions I have tried to challenge in all my work is the conceit that ideas matter very little or not at all in human history, that mentalities or collective thoughts are mere symptoms, perhaps even involuntary reflexes or passive epiphenomena, flotsam and jetsam, meaningless effluvia in the septic tank of class conflict, bobbing on the surface of a swirling gurge of natural, economic and political forces.”

“We are now repeatedly told by the thinking class that truth too, is strictly in the eye of the beholder, along with beauty and goodness, unless it happens to be a truth confirmed as such by a scientist or their political party. Yet, despite all disclaimers, there are still many on earth who believe in Truth with a capital T in a metaphysical sense, and some, unfortunately, who think that It is neatly encapsulated in some superior thoughts of their own, or some Book that they alone can interpret correctly. And sometimes they hanker for blood with an insatiable thirst...”

grok and you may now return to defending the indefensible.

Dear Davidf,
perhaps you should organise a book burning---anything by or in support of Marx which, as you invoke with ersatz religious fervor, constitutes "indefensible" "evil". In fact anything that challenges or criticises capitalism as "natural law" should be condemned as 'freethink' and 'expurgated' (you'll be needing high-sounding euphemisms).
Evil and dangerous radicals like could be rounded up and punished for their thought-crimes..

You work out the details, I'm sure you'll get a strong following!

In the meantime, read the link above and swallow your gall.

You're fond of criticising religious folk for their irrational prejudices, but it's perfectly ok for you to use precisely the same hyperbole (certainly there's never been any substance to your attacks on Marx), and to cherish your own closed-mindedness!

Dear Squeers,

I am against persecuting or prosecuting anyone for their opinions whether the opinions favour Marxism, supernatural belief, fascism or any other nonsense. I am against suppressing opinions. I am against sending people to re-education camps as the Marxists have done so that people can absorb the 'proper' opinions.

Freedom is a risky business. You allow any sort of nonsense which doesn't present a clear and present danger with the risk that people will follow the nonsense.

Capitalism is not natural law. Any of its aspects can be challenged. The particular challenge called Marxism has already resulted in great oppression. It has not shown itself to be a reasonable alternative.

you are trying to make me out as thought I approve of the oppressive tactics of totalitarian states. I fully support your right to spout your evil crap. I am just calling it for what it is.

As Davidf wrote:

<<Capitalism is not natural law. Any of its aspects can be challenged. The particular challenge called Marxism has already resulted in great oppression. It has not shown itself to be a reasonable alternative.>>

Squeers and grok, please excuse my crude attempt to understand the dialectic, but this juxtaposition of capitalism and Marxism shows, to me, an inevitability that Thesis does not necessarily throw up just one Antithesis, which inevitably leads to just one Synthesis. Thesis-Antithesis is not just some form of Manichaeanism, either/or, 'to each thesis, there is one andonly one antithesis'.

What I'm trying to grapple with is that, even in terms of Hegel's 'negation of the negation', there are any number of antitheses to any thesis: Marxism was one AT to the capitalist T; but so was a reactionary return to feudalism, or neo-feudalism. So was a withdrawal from the world entirely.

So was (is ?) the Greens' hankering for a pure, pre-capitalist, pre-feudal, pre-agricultural, world of foraging, treading lightly upon the Earth Mother.

And so is the pre-feudal, tribal, incredibly reactionary Islamism of al-Qa'ida, the Taliban, and supporters of the Khalifate - indeed, supporters of any fundamentalist religious movement. In fact, there is a sort of weird overlap between the reactionary AT of some of the Greens and the religious fundamentalists - both oppose the capitalist T, from different reactionary positions.

And of course, the supposed resolution of these T-AT struggles may produce any number of ghastly outcomes: what is the logical outcome of an extreme Green AT ? Back to the caves. What is the logical outcome of the religious-fundamentalist AT, particularly that of the supporters of the world-wide Khalifa ? A fair amount of butchery of the unbelievers, then back to the caves.

[TBC]