I went 90% personal, 60% economic.

On the broader topic I'm of the view that extreme ideologies tend to leave corpses. The numbers may be altered by particular needs, capitalism needs consumers and it needs workers so it's less prone to the bulldozers digging pit's for mass graves but at it's extreme quite happy to have people in one part of the world dying from unhealthy working conditions to maximise profits somewhere else. Harder to count bodies that way as well.

Religious extremists seem to not mind the odd pile of bodies of non-believers or if there are not conveniently located then the bodies of those who don't believe the right version of things.

R0bert

Rhian,

You have put the issue very clearly.

Antiseptic,

When you start talking about “right-wing socialism”, I wonder is there “left-wing conservatism”? Is there “conservative socialism”? Is there “socialist conservatism”?

I think of the Chinese as capitalist communists.

The whole left-right labelling is a simplification, but it has some general meaning. Think of it as a clock with democratic, centrist people at 6 o’clock. Others move to the left towards 12 o’clock. Those that reach 12 o’clock are communists. Others move to the right towards 12 o’clock. Those that reach 12 o’clock are fascists or Nazis. The destination is the same but the journey is different.

Chris Curtis

Well this is an extremely disappointing but predictable thread whose terms are dictated by the article. There's no denying the corpses that have been produced in the name of one ideology or another, but this has nothing to do with Marx, whatever David Fisher says--and he doesn't say much, he just foments and perpetuates ideological blindness.
Marx and Engels said in their own day that the Manifesto was pertinent to the geopolitical conditions of the time, and indeed that it was already dated and no longer relevant! The Manifesto itself is a complex document, indeed pamphlet, in large part rhetorical but in equal measure philosophical, and prophetical, and has to be read sympathetically to be understood beyond the purblindness of political ideologies then and since.
There's no such treatment of this important artefact here, just an ignorant rant followed by a drill, more or less, of ideological dressage, of conventional bourgeois thinking. No one has addressed the text, certainly not Fisher, except superficially and prejudicially. Were the author capable of objectivity on this subject, and willing to read the text in the context of Marx and Engel's broader thought, he could not but find it productive of a great deal of philosophical subtlety and truth, and at bottom a thoroughly humanist perspective, regardless of whether he continued to blame Marx's philosophy/sociology for every corpse since. Wonderful to be able to blame Marx and religious thinkers and Hitler and co for all the evils (sorry corpses) of the world since, it lets posterity off the hook--we're all the dupes of of our intellectual forebears. Stalin wasn't evil at all, he was just infected by Marxist memes.
But I won't say any more on Fisher's grubby, populist tripe.
What I will do is write an article myself later this year, based on a sober reading of Marx's text, in which I will do my best to explicate it warts and all, and not just some preconceived and ignorant bigotry.

Ok Squeers, Stalin was evil but not because of Marxism then.

But I am not the only one to notice that many evil people and ugly regimes have either used Marxism or could be considered properly Marxist in ideology.

Mao Zedong
Pol Pot
Robert Mugabe
Che Guevara
Fidel Castro
Josef Stalin (of course)

The list goes on...

One could be forgiven for considering that there might be a link between their ideology and their behaviour, no?

Bugsy,

I don't deny that a great deal of evil as been done under the term "Marxism", the question is whether that evil was an accurate rendition of Marx's work. Marx himself denied being a Marxist!
Each generation should shoulder the blame for their own corpses. Rationalists and entrepreneurs and popular opinion were all partly responsible for the death camps.
The question is whether the communist dictatorships since Marx were accurate renditions of Marx's thought. And I'm not going to split hairs; I'll address the question, was Marx recommending genocides, for instance? He most certainly was not.
But I'll enlarge on the subject as soon as time permits, this year, presuming Graham sanctions the article, or probably a series of articles.

ChrisC, why do you juxtapose socialism and conservativism? A more appropriate comparison would be libertarianism, I'd have thought. My view is that socialism and libertarianism, or conservatism for that matter, are entirely viable in co-existence. It's merely the extremists of all stripes who aren't prepared to compromise their purity of ideology that have problems with such mixed marriages.

I'm glad you see my point with respect to the Chinese. Very pragmatic people.