Facts for Working People, "Capitalist Class Worried about Marx's Popularity" (via Links):
Coy attacks Marx through his followers, who were some of the 20th century’s worst “mass murderers”. He starts with Lenin, who was a Marxist but Coy gives no examples of mass murder on Lenin’s part. He cites Mao who was not a Marxist, certainly not in practice. The next Marx follower is Pol Pot and what he has to do with Marxism heavens knows; and lastly Stalin, who may have had Lenin poisoned, murdered all the Marxists in the leadership of the Russian revolution and sent hundreds of thousands more to the gulag and had already abandoned any pretense to Marxist ideas or way of looking at the world except in name only. Coy's point here is to scare us, not educate us which shows how weak his position is. He wants us to associate Marx with dictatorship and the denial of basic democratic rights that Marx, and those who agree with him have fought for throughout recent history against fierce resistance from people like the economic editor of Business Week and the magazine's billionaire owner.It's like saying that christianity is obviously bogus because look at the Inquisition.
It's an ad hominem argument, or something, not about Marx (or Xst) but about his followers.
But Louis Proyect on Bourgeois Pundits not getting Marx right anyway, either (via pink scare).
That is something that bourgeois economists can’t seem to get their head around. It is not just that the masses lack consumption power; it is that the “revolutionization” of the means of production continues to replace living labor with dead labor to the point that more and more workers either become unemployed or underemployed. That is a dilemma that no amount of “helicopter drops of money” can solve.
