Well, Wolverine, I'd celebrate capitalist production, with all its horrors, over feudal serfdom any day, which I'd hardly romanticize as 'luddic,' even with carnivals and religious holidays. Feudal life was brutal and short, and most folks never went more than 10 miles from the land they belonged too.

But today I'd like to transform capitalist production through cybernation, high design and economic democracy until its something quite diferent. and I appreciate Mumford and a good many eco-thinkers along the way. But no one's put me in charge yet!

Marx, of course, was bound by his time, and Eurocentric, though less so than many of his contemporaries. But his point about ancient slavery creating the first surplus, and a class of proto-scientists who could live and work on it, to make for greater advances in knowledge, though blunt, is still true. Even ancient slavery was an advance in one way. If the earlier period, captives in war were simply slaughtered, except, perhaps, the women.

Now I'm not a straight-line, 'always onwards and upwards' historical progressivist. Some systems fail utterly, with we see in Jared Diamond's work, and even our own may come to a deadly end. But I do appreciate the gains in knowledge over the years, and the reducing of life-destroying toil and disease.

I won't bother with you comments on Lenin and Fidel, which are way off base. Ending the remnants of serfdom and Tzarist rule in Russia, however, were certainly not among Lenin's fault. With the NEP, he and Bukharin were on the right track, until it was destroyed by Stalin's reversal of it, from which the Russians are still trying to recover to this day.

As for 'lying,' name a politician who hasn't? I think Lenin and Fidel are rather low-ranking on the totem pole on that accusation.