To add to the discussion might I suggest the "Eighteenth Bumarie of Louis Napoleon."

The fear and revulsion reaction at the mention of Marx is generally made by people who have never read Marx and whose knowledge is based on what some extreme right wing sweat shop apologist had to say about what Marx said.

Marx wrote as a critique of capitalism. And the necessary pre-condition for the Marxist economy is a capitalist economy that has devolved into a state of such corruption and excess that it is no longer sustainable. To claim a system as being Marxist that developed from an agricultural base is to show ingnorance as to what Marx was saying.

Dialectic materialism is an economic concept borrowing heavily on Hegel and if Marx had any fatal flaw in his argument it is limited to his inability to see what he had in mind as an ongoing process. Hegel described a process to accomodate change when seemingly opposing forces meet. He called these elements Thesis and its opposite the Antithesis. By definition when they came into conflict neither can continue to exist and have to give rise to a new construction called a synthesis. It is the classic case of the irresistable force colliding with the immovable object. The result has to be something outside of either original entity.

Marx postulated conflicts of labor and capital in this manner as being opposing forces inimicable to each other and Communism as being the new synthesis to reconcile the worker and capital and keep them from destroying the enterprise. Marx recognized the tendency of capital was to seek monopoly whenever possible and that capital viewed labor as a barrier to maximizing profits. Labor thought the value of any thing was simply imputable to the amount of labor involved in the creation of the thing. Marx's solution was to have labor take over the means of production. Of course he was talking about unrestrianed, unregulated business and the picutre is a reflection of the horrors of the sort Dickens wrote about in Oliver Twist.

The reality is that pure capitalism and a worker's paradise are both myths and states that have never existed. Economies are mutating, ever changing dynamic states that reach out and adopt Adam Smith's comparative advantage and make it their own if they survive--and survival is simply measured in continuance.

All in all, the clearest critique of capitalism was made by Marx, and not by Ronald Regan.

Publius