Marx had serious problems with people putting words into his mouth. Lenin's State Capitalism was his attempt at "a merger of capitalism and socialism," which was just about all Marx had ever said about what communism would be. Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward also had little to do with Marx, other than being an attempt to capture Marx' admiration for capitalism's industry and productivity through a quite peculiar interpretation of socialism. And Stalin's purges were just paranoid politics. Marx did, at one point, suggest a dictatorship of the proletariat, but he was only talking about the state managing the socialist economy long enough for it to establish itself. He wasn't interested in surveillance states, secret courts, or show trials. For Marx, communism was just a future political-economic system which he believed to be a historical inevitability. He never provided an explanation of, and wasn't really interested in, what that system would actually look like. Marx saw socialism as the next step in history, not communism, and, in any event, Marx was far more interested in understanding capitalism than he was in describing what socialism was or what communism would be. As for countries that have adopted Marxist policy successfully, you might want to look at some of Northern and Western Europe's social democracies and social market economies. Right up until they were deregulated, they worked pretty well.Isn't the "communist orbit" the only possible result of applied Marxism? I think history has basically proven that in order for a communistic regime to operate, brutal oppression is the only possible reality. Are there any counter examples?
If they're Marxists, then I'm not.
-- Karl Marx
Well, I'm sure Jesus would have the same problem, but is the pope not Christian, because Christ denounced being rich? What Marx said, and what is meant by the common term "Marxism" aren't necessarily the same thing. Paranoid politics are all communism can ever be (whether we want to call them Marxist or not), because the system is so easily derailed (by, say, common sense). One has to expunge society of one's enemies in order for the system to survive. Certainly that wasn't what Marx intended or dreamed up, but there is no other way for such broad mind control to operate (and mind control is necessary if everyone is to buy into a highly engineered economic system).Marx had serious problems with people putting words into his mouth.
Marx advanced a theory of history that centers everything on economics.
Can anyone alive in the West in the 21st Century, steeped in what passes today for "common sense," claim that he got the center wrong? We can certainly argue about many aspects of his theory, but his take on the central role of economics was, for better or for worse (mostly the later, IMHO), dead on target. Money is in the saddle and rides mankind. Meanwhile, it seems to me a terrible idea to conflate religion and communism without giving at least nodding acknowledgement to all of the overtones of religiosity embedded in "free market capitalism." Neither faith serves the mass of the people well if left unchecked.
I won't argue about what any particular person may mean when he says "Marxism." If you wish to say that it's any school of thought heavily influenced by Marx' work, that's fine, but then you'll also have to include things like sociology, anthropology, philosophy, literature, history, and psychology as being Marxist. I'd say the far more reasonable definition, the one I was introduced to in a philosophy class, and the one most dictionaries list, would be the ideas of Marx (and, to a lesser extent, the ideas of Engels and Kautsky). The question you asked was, are there any counter-examples to communism as a political-economic application of Marxism? My answer was, yes, social democracy and the social market economy are examples of political-economic applications of Marxism. And, I'm afraid I don't know what you mean by mind control. If you're referring to PR or propaganda, then that's everywhere. If you're referring to dissidents being marginalized, then that's everywhere also. None of this is unique to the Eastern Bloc of the Cold War. You can say the methods sometimes differ, but this isn't related to the question at hand. I'm also not sure what you mean by a highly-engineered economy. If you're referring to the amount of infrastructure necessary, then a great deal of it is necessary for any market system, whether socialized or privatized, to function. If you're talking about regulations, then the same applies. If you're talking about planning, then this is still true. The difference between capitalized markets, socialized markets, or mercantile markets isn't engineering, it's who owns what.