Is academics who still push this philosophy on the gullible and those others who quiver with the fear that the Enlightened will find them unworthy if they ask obvious questions or draw obvious conclusions.

The history of Marxism is written broadly across the past century, and it's still murdering nations as I write this. Zimbabwe comes to mind.

Thirty very odd years ago I was living in Paris and used to argue the problems of theory found in Marx's "Eighteenth Bumaire of Louis Napoleon."

That obsure little tome was a gem of thought and analysis. My arguements were based on Marx stopping in his progression of thought on the point of dialectical materialism...

Cripes, somebody open a window. The French communist party includes Pol Pot and Ho Chi Minh as alumni. I'm not surprised.

Marxism kills. Every place it's ever been been applied. In any form. To keep clinging to the idea that it's just because it's never been done "right" is to ignore the kind of attention to experience that is one of humanity's greatest survival characteristics.

It doesn't MATTER if real-world Marxism is "according to the book," any more than it matters that wrapping bombs around children isn't written in the Koran.

If you want to propose that if Marx had finished another book, the U.S.S.R., North Korea, East Germany, Cuba, Maoist China, and all the rest would have turned out prosperous paradises, go for it. It would be among the least of the rationalizations for that system the Left has thrown out in the past fifty years.