Gurgen wrote:
It had very little to do with free markets are everything to do with creating trade monopolies for specific products at gun point and then ruthlessly exploiting those to make as much money as possible for the state and selected shareholders. Such a system does not, I would say, square very well with free market capitalism.
It does if you include the aspects of politics and violence that arid, idealised market economics disingenuously leaves out.
Apart from this economic insanity, the problem with communism and similar ideologies is that it has a strong moral component, i.e. it is an idea with good guys (workers) and bad guys (rich people, or in the Soviet sense, everyone who is not a worker). Socialists still think this way today.
I feel like you're a little short on your understanding of Marx, to be honest.
Marx was a "good capitalist" in the sense that he was a huge admirer of Smith, and his analysis in Capital actually relies on a simplistically perfect function of the labour market to a great degree in its analysis. He wrote a lot of that work in the context of 19th century Manchester, where his analysis was more accurate than it would later prove to be in other contexts—including revolutionary Russia, for example.
In Capital, Marx talks with some irony about the "double freedom" in which a waged worker is free to sell their labour to whoever will buy it, but is also free of any other goods to sell. Marx believed in a "class consciousness" that would be created by the shared economic position of proletarian workers. Basically, as their economic status became more and more similar and interchangeable, he theorised that their material interests would also coincide more and more.
This he believed would place them in a position of powerful political solidarity which would eventually lead to a crisis and revolution.
You will note that there is no assignment of moral virtue in this analysis, no goodies and baddies. It's basically workers being selfish in a system whose economic dynamics has led to the concentration of private property with a small, and equally selfish bourgeois capitalist class. As with Smith's capitalism, each actor in Marx's analysis acts in their "enlightened self-interest". Where Marx departs from Smith is in his deep interest in history, tendencies, instability and crisis. And as history subsequently showed, his insights were deep, if incomplete.
However, a similar analysis of shared material interests does produce a compelling characterisation of the way the trade union movement would secure political concessions for workers in 19th and 20th century industrialising economies.
Anyway, although Marx's efforts in Capital Volume I were arguably simplistic and are now proven to be flawed, Marxism and indeed almost all post-Marxian materialist political economy definitely doesn't work the way that you think, relying on human goodness or morality. The opposite in fact, Marx and Marxists typically despise what they identify as bourgeois moral categories.
In relation to Stalin, if you're going to say that the period of European colonial expansion and industrialisation, which often saw the stupid and unfettered implementation of policy based on the premises of then nascent free market capitalism has nothing to do with market ideology, I'll happily disclaim Stalin for my side of this debate, and rightly so.
