this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2025
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I think the main issue has been how people try to implement Marx's ideas without the full context of his work. Marx wrote while sociology and economics were in their early stages. The idea that society could be rationalized, studied and planned was a brand new idea in the Enlightenment Era.
His work builds well off of his economic axioms, but that doesn't make it a universal truth. We're quick to recognize this in many other fields of study; for example, Newtonian physics is outmoded even though it's logically consistent with our daily life. However, the mix of philosophy and socioeconomics in Marxism makes it harder for people to see that.
Since it's a description of how society should progress, it makes any deviation antithetical to the end state. To maintain the logical and materialist foundations, a new theory must be constructed and thus a new -ism is born.
The other important factor is that revolutionary periods are times of incredible change. People in the 18th - early 20th century were lurching from crumbling bedrock institutions. Things like burgeoning atheism, urbanization and mechanization left a void in identity.
So revolutionary theory started doing the lifting for all of those. It became religious dogma, career, and the core of their social life. Similar to modern religious fundamentalism, that breeds a mindset where any criticism is a personal assault and a ready acceptance for ends-justify-means public policy.
All of this means that the old truism "it doesn't work in practice" is valid but completely misses the point. Marx wrote his theory assuming a spherical cow in a vacuum, and revolutionaries started chopping cows into spheres to fit the theory.
You can see the legacy of this today. It's why the left has strict acid tests for ideological purity while the right doesn't. I don't think that a radical left utopia is currently possible, not because it runs counter to human nature but because the left can't move beyond academic theory.
Society isn't an equation that can be solved, it's a living organism adapting to its environment. Theory should form the foundation but can't be prescriptive; a doctor cures the ills that need curing because perfect health is impossible