Notes: Requiem for Marx by Yuri N. Maltsev, probably the most anti-Marxist collection ever published

After the fall of communism, and certainly after this wide-ranging demolition of Marxism by Austrian scholars, who can possibly defend Marxism? Plenty of people, many of them smart otherwise but uneducated in economics. This book is the antidote, covering the whole history of this nutty and dangerous system of thought.

Few general notes:

• Hatred was the chief motivator of the socialist revolutionary & their followers.
• We should all be thankful to the Soviets says Paul Craig Roberts because they have proved conclusively that socialism doesn’t work. No one can say they didn’t have enough power or bureaucracy or enough planners or they didn’t go far enough.
• A common mistake Western observers made was to think the USSR fundamental problem was a lack of democracy.
• The sad legacy of Marxism is the mind set of certain people who believe State can cure all economic ills and bring social justice.
• Karl Marx set the pattern, both intellectually and financially, for the present generation of well fed, well subsidized, bourgeois intellectuals. An economist who could not economize, a revolutionary organizer whose organizations invariably fell apart, a secular prophet whose prophesicies did not come true, a self proclaimed autonomous man who spent his life on Engels’ dole and in hock to pawnbrokers , the self proclaimed spokesman of the working class who never did an hour manual labor in his life, the inventor of a theory of inevitable industrial revolution that in fact have only occured in backward rural societies, Karl Marx life serves as testimony to the failure of bad ideas. Karl Marx was the foremost hater and most incessant whiner in the history of Western civilization.
• Had Lenin not successfully pulled of the October Revolution in 1917, the name Karl Marx would be known only to specialists in the history of sociology.