1. Marx did not really have a substantive first-order normative theory. He would not use the moralising - or indeed, the religious - language of 'evil'. His ea

1. Marx did not really have a substantive first-order normative theory. He would not use the moralising - or indeed, the religious - language of 'evil'. His early humanist writings make clear that the capitalist, as much as the proletariat, is hidebound by the structural constraints of capitalism. 2. It is not at all obvious that capitalism is simply and straightforwardly a system for satisfying people's wishes. For one thing, what people's wishes, interests and desires are, is not independent of the socio-historical system in and through which they have become a person in the first place. It is not something fixed. More generally, it makes no sense whatsoever to speak of 'wishing' independent of the material conditions that shape, as a matter of fact, what one can and cannot wish for. I can wish for economic democracy, but that does not make it so; a destitute proletariat, in Marx's view, can wish for something more than wage labour, but that does not make it so; someone could wish for a society founded on something other than the profit-motive, but that does not make it so. That is not to dismiss the awesome creative power of capitalist modernity - but you have a very naive view if you believe it is merely a mirror-image of the natural wishes of human beings. 3. Marx did not see 'democracy and communism' as 'incompatible'. Marx's view of democracy is significantly more complicated than that. One can find a perfect antidote to your claim in his 1871 essay on the Paris Commune. He defends a system of decentralised, self-governing communes under universal suffrage. 4. Most of the socialist Left since 1956 - when Krushchev revealed the crimes of Stalin to the Party Congress, and when he crushed the Hungary Revolution - has conceived of itself in opposition to the Soviet Union. The New Left (or 'Western Marxism') is highly anti-authoritarian.