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Originally Posted by Iowa_Flames_Fan
I'm not a socialist, and my opinion on Castro is "good riddance"--though I think the jury is out on whether his brother will be any better.
But I think your understanding of the Left Hegelian tradition is a little flawed. Mao, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin don't really belong in the same category as Marx, who along with Engels was primarily a social theorist. His one explicit political tract, the Communist Manifesto, argues not that human nature should be wiped clean, but that workers should reclaim part of the capital that they produce. It's pretty short on specifics--and if you've read it you know that. If you haven't I think you'll be surprised--it's worth picking up.
An interesting wrinkle--according to the Marxist philosophy, the endpoint of capitalism (not Marxism) is the erasure of the individual subject, who is anyway powerless in the face of monopoly capitalism, which is the final stage in its historical advancement. Note that his attitude toward "human nature" is precisely opposite to what you say.
The old saw that "Stalin wasn't a real Marxist" is true. To equate them is to engage in bad politicial history. Stalin may well have believed that "human nature should be wiped clean." Marx didn't.
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Marx expanded upon the traditional Hegalian notion of synthesis and the end of history. This implicit recognition of progress represents a belief in a blank slate. You get more of this from Das Kapital, the Manifesto was just a tract, mainly written by Engels. Marx's theory of species-essence expounded upon his belief that humans could essentially be the producers of their own future/nature.
I don't really want to get into a deep discussion on Marx, as I've only read stuff regarding his view on human nature, but the implicit assumption of man being a blank slate is definitely there and is definitely a result of his reading of Hegal.
Mao and Lenin were theorists in the Marxist tradition, but they also believed in the Marxist synthesis of praxis. Both put their own specific theories, tailor-made for rural peasantry, into action and revolution. Stalin was definitely a Marxist, he differed with Trotsky on the nature of the revolution. Stalin believed it needed to be completed in Russia before turning into a global class struggle.