If clapping is banned to accommodate those who are upset by it, I wonder what will happen to those unprepared children if they go to a theatre to see a play or other live entertainment?

Dear runner,

What about a child who has both?

Ah, the wonder of it all.

Dear Poirot,

Why are you so sensitive about Marxism? Capitalism can be horrible and rapacious, but I am very afraid of any more Marxist experiments.

I don't shout about Marxism every five minutes, but if someone uses Marxist jargon, I will point it out. You are free to use the language, and I am free to point out when you do.

Dearest Foxy,

They're pretty thick on the ground, are they ? We all know many, many people with both ? Really ?

Best wishes,

Joe

devid f,

"....if someone uses Marxist jargon, I will point it out. You are free to use the language, and I am free to point out when you do."

Certainly you are...and you're not alone these days...."Marxism" - or to be more precise - "neo-Marxism" is the right-wing shriek du jour.

Seems like you are a trend setter : )

Hi David,

Thank you for your analyses of that period between the Paris Commune and the Bolshevik 'Revolution', which have provoked me to go looking. I knew too little about Bernstein and Bebel and Luxemburg and Liebknicht, let alone Bakhunin or Kropotkin or even Plekhanov, and thde vafrious struggles to revise Marx's prescriptions.

It's fascinating that that search went off in so many different directions - to anarchism, to social democracy and democratic socialism, even, after 1905, towards some sort of Christian and mystical socialism.

And most foreboding of all, to Bolshevist Party elite control, terror and repression, a course that was to be followed by so many 'socialist' parties once they gained power. Can there ever be a socialism without its degeneration into totalitarianism ? It hasn't happened yet.

And meanwhile, the cornerstone of Marx's creation was a 'dictatorship of the proletariat', which, of course, requires a large proletariat to justify it; at the present time, the proletariat, rather than capitalism or the State, seems to be withering away.

It's no coincidence that so many 'conservative' philosophers, Hayek, Berlin, Popper, turned away from their initial socialism and spent their lives trying to devise other ways to explain society and to propose alternatives to socialism - in Popper's case, to BOTH capitalism AND socialism.

We seem to have travelled similar roads :)

Thanks again.

Best wishes,

Joe