with 20th century mass murder.
And that is a problem we should not shy away from.
One of the important questions here is whether there are elements in Marx's
thought that made it less difficult to interpret him as somebody
who justified violence.
And I'm convinced, for example, that there is something very
totalitarian in August Comte's positivism that doesn't leave space for
criticism once the positivist's truth has been scientifically guaranteed.
But Comte had this good fortune that nobody used or
abused his ideas in defence of censorship,
or defending the prosecution of critics of the positivist church.
But Marx was less than lucky in that regard.
Bloody tyrants in the West and in the East appropriated his arguments.
You can say they alienated them from his body of work, and
put them to use as an apology for their murderous projects.
And however undeserved that is for Karl Marx and poor Friedrich Engels,
there are lines in their books that lend themselves to being used in such a way.
And, here, we should really pay attention to that aspect,
because it may teach you something about the unexpected force and
the dangerous potential of social fault in general.