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> ...generally fostered violence and hostility between groups of people that do the best when they work together to create the best world together.

You seem to forget that the nineteenth century was extremely harsh (sorry, I lack a better word) for the working class. There were no regulations on anything - for instance, before a regulation law was passed (around 1860 iirc), flour , could contain things like sweat, cobwebs, and other tasty things.

It is also a well known fact that the industrial revolution had an effect on the workers - the average worker lost 20 to 30 cm of height : http://www.victorianweb.org/history/workers2.html

Speaking from the 21st century, it seems easy to dismiss Marx as irrelevant. He wasn't. He just shows from how far we come from.

Besides, saying Marx brought the khmers rouges is like saying Nietzsche brought the nazis.

(sorry for the faults, by the way, english is not my mother tongue)

> You seem to forget that the nineteenth century was extremely harsh (sorry, I lack a better word) for the working class.

Life had been harsh for almost all of history for the vast majority of people. During the nineteeth century, the general poverty that had been spread throughout the land congregated into cities for a chance at a better life there. Life was harsh, but not because of manmade oppression so much as the fact that life had always been harsh. With industrialization, quality of life improved dramatically.

> It is also a well known fact that the industrial revolution had an effect on the workers - the average worker lost 20 to 30 cm of height

From your link: "Their stature low--the average height of four hundred men, measured at different times, and different places, being five feet six inches." That was taller than almost all of Continental Europe at that time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height#History_of_human_h...

Height in England currently averages 5'10 for men; over that time, the whole world has gotten taller than England. The industrialized nations heights rose faster than non-Industrial, poverty and malnutrition was lower.

To this day, Industrialized places are much more pleasant to live than non-Industrial. For instance, South Koreans born post-Korean War are currently 5 inches taller than North Koreans. They're a lot healthier and happier too.

> Speaking from the 21st century, it seems easy to dismiss Marx as irrelevant. He wasn't.

Just the opposite. Not irrelevant. Lots of bloodshed happened from his ideas. Everywhere that implemented them had their scientific, economic, and artistic progress completely stunted, along with bloodshed and social control. I'd take this lightly, but it can't be taken lightly.

> He just shows from how far we come from.

Hopefully, yes. His ideas belong on the same scrap heap that fascism does: A way to rally a crowd over emotionally charged language that doesn't add up in real life.

> Besides, saying Marx brought the khmers rouges is like saying Nietzsche brought the nazis.

Did you read that Khmer Rouge link? They tried to do a Marxian revolution exactly. They were dogmatic about it, it's scary how bought into they were to orthodox, agricultural, labor-based Marxism, anti-capitalism, anti-bourgeois. They really, truly, deeply bought into Marxism.

"...the Khmer Rouge imposed an extreme form of social engineering on Cambodian society — a radical form of agrarian communism where the whole population had to work in collective farms or forced labor projects. In terms of the number of people killed as a proportion of the population (est. 7.1 million people, as of 1975[2]), it was one of the most lethal regimes of the 20th century.

The Khmer Rouge wanted to eliminate anyone suspected of "involvement in free-market activities". Suspected capitalists encompassed professionals and almost everyone with an education, many urban dwellers, and people with connections to foreign governments."

Check the Khmer Rouge link out thoroughly if you haven't yet - it's the most literal attempt to put Orthodox, pure Marxism into action the world has ever seen.

> Everywhere that implemented them had their scientific, economic, and artistic progress completely stunted

I think you're dismissing a bit too easily soviet russia. Under communist command, russia rised to the status of superpower.

As far as I know, khmers rouges were "reactionary" marxists : for instance they refused western medicine and dubbed peasants as "old men" and city folks as "new men". This is not what marxism is about.

> Under communist command, russia rised to the status of superpower.

The Soviet Union was an energy superpower. They used this to built up their economy (and waste money on arms).

Clearly the Cambodian and Indochina people went through an awful period. Pol Pot did extreme things as a leader but the alternative of leaving Lon Nol in power who had people starving was not good either. Whether communism or Islamic fundamentalism, anti-colonialism wars are not fun to live through. Here is a perspective I picked up from the Internet.

"A Finnish inquiry commission concludes that 1 million or fewer people died in the Pol Pot period. The commission documented that at least several thousand of those were because of direct military battles with Vietnam. Part of the discrepancy in death figures comes from those who fail to account for the decrease in births that inevitably happens when a population is lacking adequate food and fighting a war. These missed births get counted as deaths in population projections that assume the birth rate did not change."

"The United States war in Southeast Asia killed 600,000 people in Cambodia according to the Finnish Inquiry Commission. The total U.S.-caused deaths in Indochina run into the millions."

"By 1975, an estimated 10 percent of the Kampuchean population -- 600,000 -- had already died as a result of the Vietnam War. Those 600,000 deaths were caused by U.S. efforts to track down Vietnamese communists. According to the Peter Jennings documentary "The Killing Fields", Cambodia specifically absorbed 500,000 tons of U.S. bombs in the early 1970s."

"The U.S.-instigated war -- and the bombings in particular -- also caused the creation of 2 million refugees, who flooded the cities. The cities then came to depend on the U.S. food aid to live because of the war and the inefficiency of the right-wing Lon Nol regime."

"Hence, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge seized power from Lon Nol in 1975 in the worst possible situation: The people were starving, Kampuchea was the poorest country in the world and one-third of its people were refugees."

"Executions and other deaths"

"The Boston Globe coverage of Pol Pot's death contained this characterization of the Khmer Rouge: "When the Khmer Rouge marched into the capital on April 17, 1975 to establish their agrarian society, they chased out city dwellers at gunpoint, killed anyone suspected of being an intellectual, forced millions into labor camps, and demanded that children inform on their parents. People were often arrested simply for wearing glasses or knowing a foreign language. Money and private property were abolished, schools and temples were shuttered, and medicine and food became scarce. During a nearly four-year reign, as many as 2 million people died of starvation, execution illness or overwork."

"Pol Pot did execute between 75,000 and 150,000 people between 1975 and 1979. Most of those executions took place in the context of war between Vietnam and Cambodia.Vietnam invaded in 1978 and threw the Khmer Rouge out of power.The famous skull-pile pictures from Kampuchea come from a policy especially aimed at the Vietnamese.Serious famine followed again after the final Vietnamese invasion of December 1978, and by the time international aid started it was too late for many. A total of 2 million, or 30 percent of the population, died in the 1970s from the U.S. war, the Pol Pot period and Vietnamese invasions."

"The United States aided the Khmer Rouge in the 1980s, because they were enemies of U.S. foes, the Vietnamese, who had invaded and ousted the Khmer Rouge in 1979."

Marx was himself an intellectual: an economic philosopher whose work has informed western society. Blaming Marx for the anti-intellectualism of the Khmer Rouge is about as sensible as blaming Adam Smith for the atrocities of capitalist countries.

If you're not heavily mentally invested in an ideological tribe and look objectively at history you'll find that lots of "-isms" have been used to sell people on collaborating in atrocities.

Wow, I'm not even trying to argue that he had a good philosophy, just that his ideas ended up being massive failures from what he originally intended.

People cannot be judged solely by the consequences of their actions, in any case; context is also important. We don't consider Robert J Oppenheimer or Albert Einstein mass murderers even though their work very directly contributed to the deaths of thousands of civilians. We do consider Osama bin Laden a mass murder though.

Maybe you ought to be a little less vindictive in your judgment of historical figures.

> I think it's clear that no Communist nation has ever succeeded in being the bastion of democratic, personal freedom that it was ever intended to be.

Totalitarian states have all kinds of justifications for being. Most often, it was nationalism and/or religion. Non religious ideologies like communism are a phenomenon of modern times. But note that the ideologies are largely incidental. It's just a psychological jamming mechanism to fool people into letting the totalitarian structure get into place.

Nuh-uh, no, you can't give him this sort of pass. He introduced the concept of "class struggle" and "class warfare" that took over so much of modern labor/monetary/commerce/market vocabulary, and specifically said that the transition to socialism/communism will take proletariat violence. The man has inspired as much harm and destruction as any person in history.

Nope, he advocated the initial overthrow of the government. Following needless violence against civilians was never in his playbook.

And he's not even right

Well... yes. That's why we're not Socialist...

The man's philosophies have led to more misery than just about anyone else in history.

Philosophies which inspire moral outrage are despicable. Marx himself wrote no letter which advocated the truly despicable actions you speak of. For that we should blame the ones truly responsible: Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot.

I'd implore you to please, please, please stop seeing Marx as a misguided would-be hero.

Your parent did no such thing.

Marx was no friend of humanity, and should be remembered as someone who had bad and violent ideas that led to millions of people oppressed and killed as part of the "proletariat revolution to overthrow the bourgeois".

Every revolutionary's ideas end up causing similar devastation. Democracy certainly has. So has civil rights.

Marx brought this kind of thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_rouge

Laughable. The Khmer Rouge followed Das Kapital in name only.

Please, please get educated and stop whimsically giving him a nod.

I would say the same but I am not as disrespectful.

Nope, he advocated the initial overthrow of the government. Following needless violence against civilians was never in his playbook.

I never understood him to address the government as such. I understood him to advocate the overthrow of the "bourgeoisie". That is, a class of people, distinguished (among other things) by the fact that they were the ones financing (i.e., accepting the risks for) industry. It was not simply a case of unseating rulers, or even attacking the persons embodying the rule. It was far more broad, attacking ones citizen neighbors simply because they were landowners, for example.

Every revolutionary's ideas end up causing similar devastation.

Absurd. The results of "communist" revolutions of the 20th century are orders of magnitude greater than the fallout of any other revolution, before or since. We're talking about the greatest mass killings ever seen my man.

I understood him to advocate the overthrow of the "bourgeoisie".

This is mostly correct, although the correct translation for him would be the ruling class.

It was far more broad, attacking ones citizen neighbors simply because they were landowners, for example.

Never. One's neighbors are one's allies in the class struggle against the ruling class. Landowners would never be the "neighbors" of a peasant in Czarist Russia. More precisely, it would be a war waged beneath the underclass (in Russia, the serfs and such) and the ruling class. I think you have your view of history tainted by modern preconceptions. Also, you have to be careful of certain translations. Das Kapital and Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei in the original German lead to certain nuances of language that can be lost in a poor translation. Moore's is probably the best, although not perfect.

The results of "communist" revolutions of the 20th century are orders of magnitude greater than the fallout of any other revolution, before or since.

Oh, so the October Revolution (Октябрьская революция) had many more casualties than the American Revolution? Or the French Revolution (Liberté, égalité, fraternité!)? Or the American Civil War? Well, no. The incidents to which you refer are the massacres conducted by despotic rulers in so-called Communist countries. In fact, they weren't even called "Communist". They were Stalinist. Or Maoist. You hang these acts around Marx's neck like a noose but he didn't advocate them and would never approve. Marx didn't advocate massacre or mass slaughter or starvation (of the proletariat, no less!). He advocated violent revolution. Once that was done, however, the state was under the control of the people and no more violence was necessary than that needed to keep the peace. And Pol Pot? Pol Pot wasn't even remotely Marxist. Most of the Khmer Rouge attacks were targeted at the intellectuals. The intellectuals?! These were Marx's people! The intellectuals were necessary to help build a global Communist free state. Marx certainly didn't advocate killing himself.

You see, you have mistaken the acts of depravity that are the responsibility of the ones who committed them as done under the order of the "eternal Marx." In truth, Marx was nothing more than a name and a scapegoat. The people who committed these actions were stark, raving mad and committed most of them out of personal prejudice and thirst for power and control. As far as history goes, nothing out of the ordinary.

> Landowners would never be the "neighbors" of a peasant in Czarist Russia.

Why then the persecution of Kulaks?

> More precisely, it would be a war waged beneath the underclass (in Russia, the serfs and such) and the ruling class.

Karl Marx had a word for the “underclass” as you describe them. That is the “lumen-proletariat” (i.e. under the proletariat). What he advocated for them was as bad (if not worse) as his policies against the bourgeois.

> Why then the persecution of Kulaks?

You do realize that "what Marx actually preached" and "what happened in Soviet Russia" don't have to be the same thing, right? Do you really believe that Marx preached power-hungry, paranoid rulers that execute anyone that disagrees with them (or is just 'suspected' of doing so)?

Arguing against "Marx really stood for Y" with "but X happened in Soviet Russia" is intellectually dishonest.

> You do realize that "what Marx actually preached" and "what happened in Soviet Russia" don't have to be the same thing, right?

Looks like the no true Scotsman fallacy?

Your comment "Why then the persecution of Kulaks?" implies that are you arguing against a "what Marx preached" argument with a "X happened in Soviet Russia" response. Am I confusing something here?

The "no true scotsman" fallacy would be closer to redefining "Communism" to "Marxist Communism." That's not the case here because this entire thread has been about what Marx himself believed/preached/wrote.

When totalitarian hellholes call themselves "people's democratic republic of whatever", nobody blames their failings on democracy and republicanism. Why is communism held to a different standard?

> When totalitarian hellholes call themselves "people's democratic republic of whatever",

Because all those groups professes a Marxist philisophy (e.g. The democratic People's Republic of Korea). I personally attribute most of Africa's problems to Marxism. Almost all of the failed states' parties professes a Marxist ideology.

No-one can point to a communist country that works. Every communism/Marxist country that fails, is said to be "not truly communist". Yet there are many variations of free market countries and they are all at least moderately successful.

This is like trying to claim that "the Bible is a failure" because people have used it to justify everything from Nazism to plantation slavery to KKK activities.

People will glom on to an ideology (X), pull out the parts they don't like (Z) and add in some of their own 'flavor' (Y). Then they try to claim that X+Y-Z = X. And if you try to tell them differently they will just claim that their brand is the 'true' brand of X ideology. This is true of everything from socioeconomic ideologies to religious ideologies. To say that X is a 'failure' because all X+Y-Z combinations up until now have failed is intellectually dishonest. Claiming that making a distinction between X and X+Y-Z is the 'True Scotsman Fallacy' is misguided at best (and misdirection at worst).

Most of these 'so-called' communist states are nothing more than power-grabs. They use Communism as a buzz-word to gain the support of the people. Sure they also put private industry under state-control, but this has little to do with trying to improve the condition of the 'common man' and more to do with the increasing power of the government (and therefore the despot). If you're a power-hungry dictator, which sounds better: (1) you have direct control of private industry or (2) private industry can do its own thing making money for other people than yourself?

If you want to argue that the term 'Communism' is defined by what the public thinks it means (much the same argument against the people that try to correct the usage of 'begs the question'), then yes, these totalitarian states are Communism, and Communism is a failure. ...But a majority of the (American) public supported invading Iraq because they believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the attacks on 9/11, that doesn't mean it's true.

If myself and all of my friends dress up like dinosaurs, act like dinosaurs, and refer to ourselves as dinosaurs, it doesn't make us dinosaurs. Nor does it prove that 'all dinosaurs' were 5-6 feet tall, stood up-right, and spoke English.

Edit: clarification

Your first point has been satisfiably answered by fellow commenters so I will leave it alone.

Karl Marx had a word for the “underclass” as you describe them. That is the “lumen-proletariat” (i.e. under the proletariat). What he advocated for them was as bad (if not worse) as his policies against the bourgeois.

No. OK this is clearly an argument from ignorance. First, please don't give German lessons if you don't speak German. The word is "lumpenproletariat" and it doesn't refer to anything like the "underclass" of which I was speaking. Lumpen doesn't translate to "under the proletariat" but to something like "rags of the proletariat." Marx was describing the people who he saw as being the refuse of the society: thieves, con-men, pimps (brothel owners).

From Marx himself:

Das Lumpenproletariat, diese passive Verfaulung der untersten Schichten der alten Gesellschaft, wird durch eine proletarische Revolution stellenweise in die Bewegung hineingeschleudert, seiner ganzen Lebenslage nach wird es bereitwilliger sein, sich zu reaktionären Umtrieben erkaufen zu lassen.

Roughly translated to[1]:

The “dangerous class”, the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.

You'll notice that he basically said they were tools (ostensibly independent) who were likely to defend the status quo and would have to be defeated when the time came. I'd like to see where he advocated their slaughter.

[1] I'm lazy: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-ma...

> First, please don't give German lessons if you don't speak German.

I did not claim to speak German. (I can understand German when read or speaken slowly to, btw). Also note that your German "translation" is not a translation at all, but a paraphrase of the paragraph in English. The words "thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society" never occurs in the German sections.

The correct translation for "diese passive Verfaulung der untersten Schichten der alten Gesellschaft" is "the passive rotting bottommost section of the old society".

Don't give German lessons if you do not speak German.

Also note that Marx de-humanises the people (by calling them "rotten".

Also note that your German "translation" is not a translation at all, but a paraphrase of the paragraph in English.

Given that different languages have different semantics all the best translations are paraphrases.

Though perhaps you didn't notice the footnote. That is Moore's translation, not my own. Once again, you are wrong. You are literally correct, but Moore's translation (edited with Friedrich Engels) is semantically correct. If I had translated it myself I would have said something like "the passively rotting lowest strata left of the old society," which is probably a little closer to your own rather than Moore's, but for the most part I think Engels knew what he was saying, given that he helped write the original German and all.

I do speak German, btw.

Also note that Marx de-humanises the people (by calling them "rotten".

Yes, Marx was a bit of a jerk, thank you.

I understood him to advocate the overthrow of the "bourgeoisie". That is, a class of people, distinguished (among other things) by the fact that they were the ones financing (i.e., accepting the risks for) industry.

Financing means accepting the financial risks for industry. It doesn't mean accepting the risk of having your hand crushed in a cheap machine, or being poisoned by the chemicals used in the factory, etc. There is more than one kind of risk, and to imply that the investor is the only contributor to an enterprise is as stupid as saying the same thing of the laborer.

Furthermore, overthrow is a fundamentally political conflict. At the time of Marx's writing, poor people were not allowed to vote. Was that equitable? A 19th century political thinker looking at today's society would conclude that Marx had won because today everyone over 18 (with the exception of criminals in some countries) is allowed to vote. This would have been unthinkable when Marx was writing his communist manifesto.

You are assuming that the political ascendancy of a proletariat (which has arguably already happened) is directly equivalent to genocide of the middle class. Nonsensical.

Marx was a tool for change in China mostly only in name. And that was limited more than Western minds have been taught. Chinese were and are good at reading between the lines of propaganda. I agree Marx was not correct in his economic theories and he certainly crossed the line in advocating violence as opposed to simply predicting it most likely. He's certainly no hero.

However, anyone committing violence or supporting the status quo which directly or indirectly suppresses is the actor that deserves most blame. Blaming a person that lived on another continent and I'm guessing did not speak Chinese (maybe I'm wrong?) is really a stretch.

You're right, of course.

And yet Marx himself was not, himself, a despot or murderer. He was probably a pretty nice guy. Your description is therefore similarly incomplete. He can be both things. History is complicated, and not well served by summary arguments.

Yeah. All he did was advocate violence, he didn't actually commit any. All around pal.

Thomas Jefferson did almost exactly the same thing. As did Nelson Mandela.

There's a pretty big moral space between advocating the overthrow of a government and the behavior of a Stalin or Pol Pot. Marx belongs to the former category, not the latter. But because of events that happened decades after his death, he's remembered as something he wasn't. His crime was being wrong, not evil.

> As did Nelson Mandela.

Yes, and he was imprisoned for it. But what made Mandela great is that he changed and became a reconciliation figure.

The young MK starter and ANCYL member did not deserve a Nobel Peace Prize. But the Mandela in 1991 did.

Because he had no power to be a despot - that's all.

You are my hero, lionhearted. I could not agree with you more. My mother and the remnants of her family fled communist Russia in 1970. And when I say "fled" I really mean ran as fast and as far as they could. Marx preached violent struggle against those that had a different world view from his own. He should be demonized everywhere.

Several members of my wife's family were nabbed during China's rightist movement. They were tricked by Mao's urging for constructive criticism. When they offered opinions that they meant to be helpful, they were imprisoned, some for as long as twenty years.

Elsewhere on HN people have been criticized for what's been called a knee-jerk reaction to socialist ideas. But the history of socialism makes that reaction every bit as legitimate as the reaction to touching a hot stove.

Communism is not socialism is not totalitarianism.

Sweden is a socialist state, and a family is a commune.

Just because ideas have failed spectacularly in some places and on some scales doesn't mean they don't work well elsewhere.

The point that people are trying to argue here is that Marx himself felt that there was always bloody struggle to implement social change. There were several 'phases' of political change that he defines. I can't remember them all (last time I read this stuff was Philosophy 101, Feudalism was probably one of them), but currently we are on "Democracy/Capitalism". The next stage would be "Socialism" and then "Communism." He viewed transition between stages as only coming about through bloody revolution.

Side Note: While people like to say "Socialism == Communism", Marx viewed them as separate and distinct 'stages' of political/economic development.

Actually, in the original German, Marx used the words Socialism and Communism interchangeably in many of his writings. (Kommunismus and Sozialismus) It was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin who first differentiated between the two and started using socialism to refer to a transitional state between "lower" and "upper" Communism.

Of course, the socialism that most people refer to doesn't correlate with any correct definition (more closely "democratic socialism"), but what do we expect from the "unwashed masses". ;)

Heh. Then my philosophy teacher was full of it. (Not that it surprises me) Thanks for the correction. :)

knee-jerk reaction to socialist ideas.

Among a well-educated and logical population, knee-jerk reactions are always improper.

Really? No cached conclusions allowed?

One would have a cached answer to a problem if the circumstances and question were identical, i.e. same function, same input. In normal conversation, these are almost never the same. In addition, language is faulty and ambiguous. As an astute reader, one has the responsibility to attempt to understand the argument in the full complexity of how it was meant, not just how it was said. To this end, there are very few identical answers to identical questions. Certain answers may be similar to answers given to similar questions in the past, but they should never be knee-jerk. Instead, they should be reasoned and polite with as much understanding as possible. Of course, everyone responds out of frustration at times, but this should never be held to be ideal.

My grandpa was sent to labour camp merely for being a professor and having relations in Taiwan, he wasn't even very vocal about politics. My grandma avoided it by being on an expedition at the time. From their account, it didn't seem like that people were merely tricked into criticizing the state.

During the civil war, the communists has substantial support from the academics and intellectuals (think Spanish Civil War). This combined with successful economic policies during the early 50s made Mao overly confident of his support base.

At the time the Nationalists in Taiwan was still recognized as the legitimate government of China on the world stage, so Mao wanted some vocal support. To his surprise he opened the can and worms came out, which caused huge embarrassment, and he blamed it on rightist infiltration.

As a reaction he locked up "naysayers" and implemented radical ideological-based economic policies that ended up in disaster, so he stepped down for a few years. During the time his rival Liu Shaoqi became the chairman, who played with the idea of market economy and was warming up to the west.

This infuriated Mao as it implied his failure as a visionary, so he out-maneuvered Liu and launched the cultural revolution to manufacture support for his vision on a large scale. It helped him to maintain power til his death, but at the cost of running the country into the ground.

From their account, it didn't seem like that people were merely tricked into criticizing the state.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Rightist_Movement#Origins :

The Anti-Rightist Movement was a reaction against the Hundred Flowers Campaign, which had promoted pluralism of expression and criticism of the government. It is not clear whether the Hundred Flowers Campaign was a deliberate tactic to smoke out "rightists", or whether Mao simply decided that it had gone too far.

My father-in-law spent time in prison with Wang Ruowang, noted dissident mentioned here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Ruowang

Oliver Cromwell, who is generally regarded as the father of English Republicanism (bearing in mind that the English Parliament is the oldest in the modern world) also carried oppression of the Irish which today we would unhesitatingly class as genocidal.

My own wife's family hail from North Vietnam. Not particularly educated or politically opinionated, they nevertheless saw several off their family wiped out by what we'd today call 'collateral damage' - in this particular case, the family home had the bad luck to be within spitting distance of a factory, and got flattened by an American bomb.

Permit me a degree of skepticism about the moral purity of institutions we take for granted. though I'm neither a communist or a socialist, I don't see that being democratic and capitalist gives anyone a free pass to kill people.

Thank you for formulating such a concise, clear, and true reply. I've tried many times, and never been able to express it so well. I'm going to copy this off into my notebook for future use, if you don't mind.

Well your argument isn't exactly strong either. What is "socially necessary abstract labor-time"? You didn't say why did you start debunking his confused theories from this point. Wikipedia says:

The simplest definition of socially necessary labour time is the amount of labour time performed by a worker of average skill and productivity, working with tools of the average productive potential, to produce a given commodity.

but none of the examples you gave actually are comodities. Somebody would have to pay for them - obviously that's possible but lets see how:

Pasteurization is an invention - the patent system is at least as flawed as Marx's theories

Creating GMail - software patents QED

Picasso - work of art, copyrights, again a very hot topic even now

Besides is it such a central point anyway? Obviously his theories led to people dying. Then again without the threat of communism we would be probably still forced to work without unions, without social and health security and a million of other beneficial things.

How can you judge Marx's contribution to history only negatively as a "no friend of humanity" is beyond me. You cannot see the world around you just in black and white!

Marx's work predates the marginal revolution, so he can't be personally faulted for not understanding concepts like marginally decreasing utility.

But at least as I understand his work, much rest on his association of labor with value. And if you want to focus only on commodities, well, this is where the effect of marginal utility is most pronounced.

And since marginal utility pretty much destroys the relationship between labor and value, it should be sufficient to discredit Marx's economics. (not that this is the only argument)

without the threat of communism we would be probably still forced to work without unions...

I can't imagine how you built such an idea. Particularly since unions in particular are fundamentally communist.

The Labor theory of value was as much a creation of Adam Smith and David Ricardo as Karl Marx. No less a personage than Lincoln extolled it in glowing terms; economics wasn't that sophisticated back then.

Blaming Marx directly for the evils of totalitarianism is absurd. I am a capitalist but I recognize that this system has also been a vehicle for exploitation and repression, just like communism and mercantilism. Marx didn't kill anyone or urge the death of anyone, he just viewed the system of bourgeois (middle class) capitalism as unsustainable, just as hereditary feudalism had proved unsustainable before that. His ideas about what would and should replace it are wrong, but foolishness is not the same as mendacity.

The man's philosophies have led to more misery than just about anyone else in history.

A bold statement...and an unsupportable one. Shall we examine the influence of platonic thought on subsequent authority? Or the lives lost in pursuit of monotheistic ideals? How many have died under the banner of droit de seigneur? Most of us enjoy the modern luxury of evaluating Marx's errors from a position of considerable economic and political freedom, far removed from what was available to the proletariat during Marx's day. Back then, most people weren't allowed to vote; even the various reform acts brought very slow progress and women weren't considered worthy of having political opinions until long after Marx had died.