Prometheus 6

Another reason to call this writer's comments stupid is because of his insistence on not using any words or terminology derived from what he calls "Marxist thought." I don't think this writer has an appreciation or understanding of how many social analysts and critical thinkers of the right and left, owe a debt of gratitude, regardless of whether they agree or disagree with Marx, to his critique of the role of labor, work and capital. Marx, whatever his analytical failures or personal shortcomings, is an essential part of the Western canon of philosophical and political economic thinking. One can vault over him, go around him or burrow underneath him but no one who is serious about understanding the modern world and how it came into existence can ignore Marx. Do these so-called conservatives truly believe that their thinking and the world it attempts to describe is called into being ab ovo? These folks, I suspect, are only serious in their nearly messianic zeal to rewrite and revise history. If left to their own devices they'll eventually have folks believing that Africans actually purchased tickets to make the Middle Passage. This may be a harsh judgment but it is no less delusional than the Democratic Leadership Council's belief that John Kerry could be elected president of the United States.

what PTCruiser said.

i don't recall seeing any of those three buzzwords in The Communist Manifesto -- maybe i should re-read it again just to make sure. my suspicion is that they don't occur anywhere at all in political writing until a generation after it was written.

of course, as with many of the so-called disciplines, it's altogether too easy to BE read than to HAVE read...

i can't tell you the number of capitalists with MBAs who have told me that C.M. is the most important book on historical economics they have read.

It's sillytalk. If buddy wants to eliminate 'ism' from the vocab on account of its power to change folk into Communists (gasp), buddy, knock yourself out.  Bigotry manifests itself in a number of ways.  If he prefers a multi-syllabic thing like sexual-bigotry or racial-bigotry or wotever, buddy, go nuts.

Karl Marx didn't employ any of those terms but the writer's point was that they were derived from certain categories of thought based on Marx's analysis of history and economics as interpreted by people who either have identified themselves as Marxist or claim to be influenced by his constructs.