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Article: After communism - Marx; Marx's intellectual legacy.(The post-communist Karl Marx)
- Article from:
- The Economist (US)
- Article date:
- December 21, 2002
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 Economist Newspaper Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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As a system of government, communism is dead or dying. As a system of ideas, its future looks secure
WHEN Soviet communism fell apart towards the end of the 20th century, nobody could say that it had failed on a technicality. A more comprehensive or ignominious collapse--moral, material and intellectual--would be difficult to imagine. Communism had tyrannised and impoverished its subjects, and slaughtered them in the tens of millions. For decades past, in the Soviet Union and its satellite countries, any allusion to the avowed aims of communist doctrine--equality, freedom from exploitation, true justice--had provoked only bitter laughter. Finally, when the ...