Gellner

I found Gellner's article fascinating and thought he made some very interesting claims. For instance, he baldly states, "Marxism, because it unites the political, ideological, and economic hierarchies, inevitably leads to totalitarianism." Perhaps because of my capitalist bias, I find myself agreeing with him. Communism demands total unification of society under the direction of the proletariat, and in complex societies, that means unification of political, ideological, and economic concerns. If everything is unified, what else can we get but a totalitarian state? I guess the question is, then, whether a totalitarian state is so bad if you're after the Marxist ideal. Marxism is portrayed in the article almost like a religion ("secular salvation"). The "rightness" of Marxism would mean that it necessarily controlled all aspects of society rigidly according to that standard. Gellner dismisses the method of salvation along with the fall of the Soviet Union with the argument that the USSR was diverse (culturally, politically, etc.), yet the salvation method stuck nowhere.
On another note, it's interesting that he predicted the invasion of Iraq almost 10 years before it happened.