Indeed. It's too bad that so many leftist intellectuals try to defend Marx as merely a product of his time, or worse, as someone misunderstood. The reality is

Indeed. It's too bad that so many leftist intellectuals try to defend Marx as merely a product of his time, or worse, as someone misunderstood. The reality is that Marx's ideas were bad, and were understood to be bad at the time by contemporaries like Bakunin who swiftly identified the obvious flaw in the plan: no state powerful enough to perform massive redistribution of wealth from the bourgeois to the proles would ever simply say "job done" and dissolve itself. To argue for the Marxist plan was inherently to argue for totalitarian dictatorship of a vast and powerful bureaucratic state.