Let me repeat that I have no affection whatever for Marx, his toxic ideology, or his followers. Also, I have the deepest respect for Solznhenitsyn and his good friend Shafarevich, who both personally suffered in the Gulag. I’ve read The Gulag Archipelago several times now and have never been so moved by any other book.

My only objection to your remarks is to characterize the proletariat as the “lazy, tax-eating, non-disabled poor”, as you did in COmment #4. In Marx’s theories the proletariat was far more narrowly defined as skilled industrial workers and no one else. Marx saw these individuals – and NOT the peasants/serfs let alone the people who worked in shops – as being the seed for his revolution. But he felt that they couldn’t do it alone and fancied him and his followers the (self-styled) intellectuals as being essential to “guide” the proletariat in the process of creating a revolutionary situation that could be exploited to overthrow capitalism.

Inevitably, practice departed from theory rather dramatically when Lenin tried to follow Marx’s teachings but Lenin held to Marx’s notion that the proletariat was the industrial workers alone. Lenin quickly resorted to armed force to force the serfs to follow his will. He actually tried to work with the proletariat but soon found that most of it was unsuitable to his needs. He formed temporary alliances with the skilled technocrats – like the engineers that operated the Moscow sewer system – for as long as it took for them to train replacements, then disposed of them too. Make no mistake about it, Lenin was a vicious bloodthirsty brute whose only saving grace was that he died young, helped along by an assasin’s bullet that didn’t kill him but is thought to have contributed to the strokes that *did* kill him. Unfortunately, his successor Stalin was equally ruthless but lived a lot longer.

So again, I am NOT defending Marx, or Marxism or any follower of Marxism; I am just disputing your definition of the term proletariat as it appears in Marxist theory. Marxism has been one of the biggest blights on humanity ever to occur.