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Dic Lit  

In his survey of the writing of dictators, Daniel Kalder is so dismissive of the tyrants’ actual ideas that it becomes difficult to understand why they had any power in the first place.





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Marxism’s Fatal Flaw  

Marx’s social-democratic critics recognized a fundamental point that the great economist missed: that a better world was not inevitable, but achievable, and that their job was to bring that world into being through politics.











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Marx Is Dead, Long Live Marx’s Ideas  

Jonathan Sperber is right to portray Marx as a product of his times. But he goes astray in limiting the application and relevance of Marx’s ideas to the relatively brief time—from 1840 to 1880—in which he wrote. If a thinker discerns deeper trends within the history of his time, he may produce ideas that are relevant well beyond his passing.











Marx and Market Socialism  

Karl Marx ruled out any role for the market in a post-capitalist economy. “Within the cooperative society based on common ownership of the means of production,” he wrote in the Critique of the Gotha Program, “the producers do not exchange …



From Sweden to Socialism  

Capitalism doesn’t work: the 1930s proved that. Communism doesn’t work: the 1980s proved that. So what works? Socialism—of the democratic variety, of course. But, viewed concretely, as it is applied in practice, what is socialism today? The answer is—the mixed …