I once heard a Communist say in a speech that blaming Karl Marx for the atrocities done by 20th century Communists is like blaming Jesus for the Crusades and Inquisition. I think that's a valid point, to an extent. I can see how this book set imaginations going and gave hope to the downtrodden, much in a way that the arrival of Methodism in the 18th century gave cause for optimism among the working classes of England. I think given human nature, something like a Communist experiment was unavoidable. Communism had high ideals but human greed and sadism condemned it to failure, and now it should be abandoned and laid aside as a relic of the past. Communism studied as yet another misapplied utopian blueprint is a fine subject to read about, but the real tragedy is that a billion and a quarter human beings are still shackled in the year 2005 to the chains of this hopeless, fatally handicapped nineteenth-century hypothesis.