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Isn't writing lists of people you hate meant to be something that you grow out of by the age of 15 or so?
Horowitz appears to be trying to emulate the success of Neo-McCarthyite Ann Coulter. It just won't work. Horowitz can manage sloppy scholarship but when it comes to making stuff up his attempts are truly pathetic.
Having grown up in the cold war, I was expected to know this stuff: Know your enemy. But just as very little that TV evangelists say can be deduced from the sayings of Jesus in the New Testament, very little of what happened in the Soviet Union could be predicted from reading Marx.
It is quite possible for someone to quote from Karl Marx without being a Marxist. Newt Gingrich does it very frequently. Marx was actually a very big fan of Capitalism, he thought it was a great step forward from feudalism. When people are praising capitalism they are usually using an argument first made by Karl Marx. So merely repeating arguments made by Marx does not make someone a Marxist.
Marx also thought 'capitalism' was an intermediate stage rather than the end point of human development. And he was certainly right in thinking capitalism would change. He was writing in the mid 19th century before the internal combustion engine or electric light were invented.
So while, like Plato, Marx is a very important political thinker, almost nothing of what he wrote is directly relevant to our own time. Marx said nothing about 20th or 21st century capitalism, he never saw either in action.
February 2006 · Books