I think, basically, for the past 150 years or so, Social Democracy (I include Leninism, Maoism, Trotskyism, etc. under this term) has gotten Marx distorted, wrong, incomplete. ---snip [WS:]
Interesting. I think this statement is both right on the target and utterly confused. You are right on the target saying that Marxism has been distorted by the scores of nationalist leaders in Eastern Europe and Third World countries. I am currently reading a biography of Pol Pot by Philip Short which claims that the Khmer Rouge leadership had little interest or understanding of Marxist theory. All they cared about was a guide on strategy how to build a successful nationalist movement against the French, the Vietnamese, the Thai and the internal enemies. Their reading of "Marxism" was limited to strategy guidelines by Stalin or Mao.
Alexander Gerschenkron (_Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective_) makes a similar claim about Russian "Marxism." He argues that the goals of the Bolshevik leadership were centered on nation-building and modernization, and to that end they followed institutional models developed earlier in capitalist France, Germany or Meji Japan. The "Marxism" they adapted was basically a "managerial ideology" - a combination of selections from scientific literature and popular wisdom put together to legitimize the manager's (or ruler's) claim to power. The Soviet 'Marxism" was really a variation on the traditional Russian peasant populism and collectivism, peppered with pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo lifted from popular texts on political economy of the times.
When you seem to go completely haywire is equating social democracy with Third World revolutionary nationalism. The fundamental difference between the two lies in what Gramsci called "civil society." Many Third World countries were basically backward feudal fiefdoms with despotic and incompetent overlord class ruling over illiterate peasantry and very little in between - whatever little industrial classes (proletariat or bourgeoisie), merchant or artisan classes there were - they were largely of foreign stock (Cambodia at the turn of the century was probably a good example).
In such "social vacuum" the nationalist activists and reformers could take a "designer" approach to social change. Their main task was to overthrow the feudal autocracy - and once that had been accomplished they felt that they could design new social institutions by fiat, as there had not been any historical institutional path that could serve as the backbone, prototype or starting point of the new social order. The Khmer Rouge decision to dismantle the budding urban strata in Cambodia and implement their vision of rural "utopia" is a good example of this situation, but Trotsky (_Results and prospects_) takes a similar approach to the Russian situation.
However, more developed countries (especially western Europe) had a rich network of intermediary "civil society" institutions, which as Gramsci observed, made a "designer" approach to social change (i.e. overthrow of autocracy followed by building of a revolutionary social order form scratch) a losing proposition in such countries. In that context, social democracy i.e. counterbalancing market relations with democratic social and political institutions is probably as close to a Marxist vision of social organization as it gets.
I understand that "wimpy" social democratic institutions have zero appeal sanguine revolutionary fundamentalists (and even smack of treason) - but by now we have plenty of historical evidence that revolutionary fundamentalism of any stripes never leads to anything good.
Wojtek