I skimmed it when I saw he was going down some Wind Of Change gorky park bullshit to lend credence to his point. guardian keeps crashing my netbook, will you post the paragraph pls
Karl Marx was a gentle man, but his ideas would lead to human suffering almost unequalled in the history of the world. On the best current figures,
about 6 million Russians were murdered in the era of Joseph Stalin – and that’s before you factor in the sufferings of eastern Europe from 1945 onwards, or the other revolutions from China to Cuba.
Today, the terrifying reality of Marxism in power has been consigned mercifully to the history books, but it has strange echoes. Clearly,
Jeremy Corbyn is no Stalin, or Lenin, or Mao Zedong, just a long-serving British MP, but Marxist ideas live again in some spectral form in Corbyn’s runaway campaign and the enthusiasm of his supporters for a truly socialist Labour party. In one of the unspun answers that makes him appear authentic to supporters,
Corbyn called Marx “a fascinating figure who observed a great deal and from whom we can learn a great deal”.
And:
I don’t think that after the fall of communism you can reject the capitalist economy root and branch or want to subject it to strong state control as Corbyn does. Markets are human, they have a powerfully creative side as well as a harsh unjust side, and to believe otherwise is to indulge in the same folly that killed the hapless peasants who Stalin labelled capitalist “kulaks” and saw fit to starve and shoot. The anti-market obsession that has overtaken the thinking left since Lehman Brothers is a treason by intellectuals whose hypocrisy is glaring. It’s like the old Monty Python gag. What has capitalism ever done for us – apart from the clothes, the food, the computers, the films, the pop music, and all the other stuff people swarmed the Berlin Wall 26 years ago to get their share of?
He even invokes the city named after Uncle Joe (and mis-spells 'Volgograd'):
In Russia I came across Marxism Today in a news kiosk in Vologograd – that is, Stalingrad. Of course! It had been
funded by Moscow all along, like the entire Communist Party of Great Britain. So that too was compromised. And beside the vast silver emptiness of the Volga, the kulaks were nowhere to be found.
