Your essay predates mine by about 5 years. That doesn't make mine any more memorable. As I recall it, Marx's theories rested on his idea of the evolution of society, that different iterations through history moved inexorably towards a rising of the proletariat against their masters, seizing the instruments of power, largely the capital of production, and changing ownership from bourgeois to the people. History has proved him incorrect and his theories inaccurate. Other sociologists proved more prescient, examining the resilience of power structure within society. Was it Max Weber who predicted the entrenchment of bureaucracy as a means of defending the status quo? Marcuse and his One Dimensional Man with the illusion of freedom and choice? Half-remembered dreams, perhaps, and I don't know that any of them had strong views on what human flesh tasted like.
that sounds about right to me. But all experiments in communism have not turned out well for the ordinary people. My in-laws escaped from communist Poland in the 1960s. (My father-in-law was jailed because he wouldn't join the Communist party) So I have heard lots of stories about the brutality of Communist Russia. I'm not sure there is any corollary between what Marx wrote and what happened in Russia.
I think Communist USSR (and Communist most anywhere else) is utterly different to what Marx envisaged. Stalin didn't exhibit any great concern for the peoples within the soviet bloc of Eastern Europe. Quick check on google and he's held responsible for conservative estimate of 7 million deaths in Russia, possibly as high as 23 million. Mao probably topped that by some margin. Power to the people? Didn't think so.
1917 to 1989 proved the lack of economic sense in the works of Marx. And it is playing out again in Venezuela once again.
Marx would have shit a gold brick if he saw a communist revolution break out in Russia. It would have been dead last in potential countries according to his theories. Britain and Germany were his "inevitabilities."
Cue the inevitable "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" video ... although that movie came out in 1975, and Carter was "attacked" in 1979, so although it's tempting to think that the Pythons were inspired by this story, it's definitely not true. (Unless one of the Pythons was a Time Lord, of course). Then again, the Pythons were more than capable of coming up with the "killer rabbit" idea all on their own. "You mangy Scots git! What's he do, nibble your bum?" "He's got huge, sharp-- eh-- he can leap about-- look at the bones!!!" ... and so on, and so on ...
