Overall HP.
I don't think he was generally evil or so, indeed identified problems with excessive capitalism, but his proposed "cures" were questionable all too often.
The big flaw with Marx was that he was good at identifying problems and extremely short on developing detailed 'cures' to those problems. His later acolytes stepped into the breach with... um... mixed results, but those by and large can't be laid at the feet of Marx the man.
He identified a good system (capitalism) and decided that it was a problem.
It’s worth bearing in mind that Marx didn’t consider capitalism to be a problem in and of itself. He was actually surprisingly complementary of it in certain writings - he considered it a necessary stage in the upward progress of humanity that would soon be replaced by socialism (a further advance), a stance that marks him out from some other socialist thinkers of the time (Fourier) who regarded capitalism and its accoutrements (trade, investment) as bad in and of themselves.
One could argue that the 21st century version of capitalism, at least in Western democracies, would be considered socialism in 1840s year, and capitalism accordingly did evolve as marks wanted. Perhaps Marxism - leninism was a schism that missed the point of Marx's teachings?
Umm… no. When Marx envisioned socialism in 1848, he didn’t say “Socialism is when the government builds roads and schools.” The concept of government spending was not a new concept at that time, and has been around for thousands of years. What Marx meant by socialism was a dictatorship of the proletariat- which never came to pass in the West. The fact that support for capitalism has increased over the years shows that he was wrong, and that through government welfare and intervention, capitalism can thrive and be potentially perpetually sustainable.
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