grown up under incessant capitalist propaganda that implicitly denies the validity of his charges and the relevance of the facts he sites. Socialism is not a subject that can be effectively debated outside college campuses since it is an unexamined article of dogma that Marx is a pariah and his ideas are to be rejected without ever taking them seriously.
It is a shame, because whatever the shortcomings of his analysis of the social conditions of the industrial state, or his messianic prescriptions for the dictatorship of the proletariat, his basic criticisms of the profoundly negative effect of capitalism on the majority of human beings still remain true. He clearly foresaw the co-optation of what he and Engels called "bourgeois democracy" by the power of wealth, something that will be on display every day the Bush Administration remains in power, although it was only slightly less so under the Democrats. And more than a hundred years ago he predicted that capital would always exploit the poorest of the poor to lower labor costs and t
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