[Touche]

Marx and Engels might not have been evil but virtually all other communist thinkers / politicians were. You should go read the writings pre-Bolshevik revolution to get an idea. A big problem with Marxist thinking is that it encouraged pseudo-science and the belief that there was only 1 possible correct interpretation of history. So pre-Bolshevik thinkers competed for who was right, spiraling towards more and more extreme thinking, with the more strong-armed Lenin eventually winning out (and killing his rivals). What happened later was pretty inevitable once you understand the appeal of Marxism and understand that it's targeted at affluent intellectuals, not at the poor.

[alphonsegaston]

This is such a gross exaggeration. Were the Frankfurt School, many of whom were Jews who escaped the Holocaust, exploring how Capitalism gives rise to fascism through the lens of Marxism, "evil thinkers?" Are the democratically elected communist politicians in countries like Japan evil?

Bending over backwards to defend totalitarian regimes like the Soviets or CCP is obviously grotesque, but this kind of blanket pronouncement is about as nuanced as their thinking.

[Touche]

I wasn't aware that the Frankfurt School thought of themselves as communists. This is news to me. Can you refer me to any writings by them where they talk about this? Thank you.

[alphonsegaston]

Marxists.org has an archive of many of their writings:

https://www.marxists.org/subject/frankfurt-school/

And Horkheimer is of course famous for saying, "If you don't want to talk about capitalism then you had better keep quiet about fascism."

[Touche]

That's irrelevant to whether they self-identified as Communists. The link you gave indicates that they didn't, quite the contrary.

[alphonsegaston]

Ah, apologies. I thought you were asking in good faith instead of trying to score some semantic point. In that case, you describe Marx as a "communist thinker", which would make the Frankfurt School(who were Marxists) communists by the terms of your categorization.

[Touche]

Why did you think this was a good-faith conversation when your assumption is that I was saying any Marxist sympathetic person is evil?

[dragonwriter]

> You should go read the writings pre-Bolshevik revolution to get an idea.

Oh, if your just talking about Leninist vanguardism a d it's Stalinist, Maoist, etc. descendants, sure.

But that's not all of post-Marx Communist thought, and its a subset that shares common and fundamental deviations from Marx, and it's been criticized by non-Leninist Communists since day one.