Further, there seems to be a bit of gulf between this position, and say, Jon and Thirdform's engagement with Marx. I see them using Marx's thinking in a way that a lot of people do, as a tool to think and analyse with. Tools for thought. It struck me as a huge reach to connect this usage of Marx with brutal practices of 20th Century Marxist regimes - it just struck me as such an .... ungenerous reading, which was why I found it annoying.
I openly admit that I haven't ready any Marx, not even a Dummy's Guide. I'm less interested in what he wrote (and less still in the vast reams that other people have written about what he wrote) than I am in the concrete reality of actual societies and actual economies that have tried, however imperfectly, to put his ideas into practice.
If that seems unfair, then consider: if someone started a thread here about how the solution to all our problems is to get back to 'real' Christianity, would it be 'ungenerous' to mention the Spanish Inquisition, the Conquistadors, the witch hunts and all the rest?
I mean, I appreciate that no-one here is actually a tankie or identifies as a Stalinist or thinks that he was a great guy or anything, but at the same time, several people here have been bending over backwards to defend the USSR and its hegemony over eastern and central Europe, often using arguments that are totally unfalsifiable. Every aspect of economic dysfunction in communist countries can apparently be put down to the nefarious influence of capitalist ones, for example. And while some countries have become developed by trading with rich, ex-imperial countries, other countries are apparently being kept
undeveloped by exactly the same mechanism. It just seems like a theory so malleable that it can be applied post-hoc to explain pretty much anything.