Was Marx A Utopian Genius Or An Absolute Buffoon?

I am personally of the opinion that Marxism is impressively irrational. Others may disagree, but that’s fine. This topic is just for people to discuss their opinions on Marxism freely (keep profanity to a minimum and be civil with each other).

He was a utopian buffoon.

Maybe that's too harsh. I'd probably classify him as a good philosopher but a bad economist, which would match the reception he gets in each respective field. You can be a good philosopher and still wrong almost all the time.

But at least most people who follow the work of Socrates, Plato, Keynes, or Newton admit that the field has advanced past them. Occasionally you get someone like Marx with a cult of personality that insists all modern research that contradicts them is wrong.

I like that view. He was right to believe that there would be some sort of revolution against a ruling class that was, back in his time, much more emphasized and tyrannical than that of modern-day America. But he was a terrible economist, considering that his proposed economic system would have to result in the state having to generate prices at random, provide manufacturing quotas based on uninformed guesses, and also that he seemed to be completely ignorant of the fact that employers might actually be an important part of a functioning society.

Karl Marx never ran a lemonade stand, or he would have understood there's more to a producing business than bourgeois and proletariat [management and direct labor], and would have realized that his brand off economy does not know how to create personal wealth, but everything about spending other peoples' wealth until there is no more. He ignored a n enduring free market economy for one that collapses when other peoples' money is used up.

Christians who think the story of the young wealthy man who asked Jesus how to get to heaven think Christ's advice to him was for all off us: give all your money to the poor. No, that was advice for that young man, because he was jealous of his wealth. There are many wealth people who are charitable to help a person down on their luck, and wants to recover, but do not want to help when an able-bodied potential worker is too lazy for self-sufficiency. The wealthy should remain wealthy to help as many people as they can, while retaining wealth to continue that practice.  Christ was social, not a socialist.

Marxism won in almost every country, even in USA, which is why you have things Marx argued for, such as government healthcare, minimum wage, regulations of buisnesses, welfare...

Its great that you think how ideology which conquered almost entire known world is "irrational", but it is actually the world which is irrational for allowing itself to be conquered by such nonsense.

Ha! It’s not harsh enough. He was a bum.

He gave us socialism, Russia and China. Capitalism gave us Trump.

Sounds like capitalism wins.

When the concepts are irrational, you can manipulate them with valid logic all day and still produce incoherent non-sense.

Definitions need to be precise, if there are variations they must not be equivocated upon, there can be no circular references, properties must be derived not asserted.

All of the words Marx uses fail one or more of those tests. It's incomprehensible, and whether Marx was an arrogant nutjob who thought it made sense or whether that was an intentional manipulation to call critics stupid doesn't matter.

We have someone on this site who can provide a good analogy.

Marx is to economics and political philosophy as ebuc is to physics and cosmology.

Donald Trump is an avowed enemy of free trade. "We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies, and destroying our jobs," Trump declared in his 2017 inaugural address. "Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength."
Most economists disagree with that assessment. As they will tell you, free (or even just freer) trade benefits all parties involved. Protectionism, by contrast, hurts consumers and businesses alike.
Unfortunately, Trump is not alone in his economic ignorance. Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) also dislikes free trade, denouncing it as "part of a global race to the bottom to boost the profits of large corporations."
Perhaps Trump and Sanders should each spend a little time studying Karl Marx. Yes, that Karl Marx. Although the fact is often forgotten today, Marx had a number of positive things to say about what we now call globalization. As the left-wing economist Meghnad Desai documented in his enlightening 2002 book Marx's Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism, Marx "was a champion of free trade, and no friend of tariff barriers." Indeed, Marx saw global capitalism as a revolutionary force that, in the words of The Communist Manifesto, "rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life." 

Marx wasn't even worth shooting at.

Also, Marx would have supported punishing the EU tariffs since he and Trump both agree there should be zero tariffs on both sides.

Marxism is one of those ivory tower philosophies that make no sense whatsoever, but if you hypnotize yourself into them by thinking hard about them and trying to make it work in some imaginary world, then you may succeed. It is much like religion in that it is completely detached from reality, but you can be drawn into it through peer pressure.

If Marx was a utopian genius we would all be living in a utopia. Marx had 0 understanding of human nature or what animates or motivates a person. Metaphorically speaking, he couldn't understand why people would not want to lick shit out of his ass for bread crumbs.

Marx was good at lying down and scratching his balls. That's all.

Most of what he wrote is mental mansturbation of a fkn lazy man. He had the fortune that some of his writings were considered as something worth the time, maybe because it was suis generis but time has proven that it was mere crap.

He was definitely a utopian. But unfortunately not a genius.

Marx began a career as a journalist in his early 20s, writing for radical newspapers in Cologne and in Paris. Throughout, he consorted with other liberal-minded philosophers and, by his mid-20s, met and collaborated with one of the major influences in his life, Friedrich Engels. It was Engels who convinced Marx that society's working class would be the instrument to fuel revolutions and bring about a more fair and just society.

While it's true that Marx wrote for newspapers in his 20s, portraying him as simply a journalist from the start oversimplifies his path. He initially pursued an academic career, earning a doctorate in philosophy, but turned to journalism after being barred from academia due to political reasons. The claim that he wrote for "radical newspapers" in both Cologne and Paris also glosses over important differences. Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne started as a moderate liberal paper and only became more radical under Marx’s editorship. Referring to his philosophical circle as "liberal-minded" misrepresents the reality. Marx was aligned with the Young Hegelians, who were radical critics of religion and the state, far beyond classical liberalism. While he first met Engels briefly in 1842, their real collaboration didn’t begin until 1844, when Marx was 26. Lastly, suggesting Engels convinced Marx of the revolutionary role of the working class gives too much credit to one side; both thinkers influenced each other deeply, and Marx had already begun exploring the idea of class struggle before their partnership solidified. The development of Marxist theory was a joint and evolving effort, not a one-sided conversion.

Marx was a bourgeoisie hypocrite, who succumbed to a phlegm problem.

He inspired authoritarian monsters and made not a scrap of difference to the lives of the proletariat.

Just a useless, over-bearded, bull-shitting  pisshead.

He had a lot of perceptive insights into the nature of the emerging economic order of his time, and like most prognosticators he made a lot of good predictions and a couple of shoddy ones. Overall, a decent albeit flawed thinker for his time, like many of his contemporaries. Most of the people who call him dumb haven't even read his work, it's just an ideological clique reflex. Half of them wouldn't even be able to parse it if they tried.

Take capitalism for instance. If someone says that Marx was 'anti-capitalism' it's very revealing. It reveals that they get all their ideas shoved into their brain by the YouTube commentariat and have never read a single thing that the man wrote. Whatever you may think of him, Marx was one of the most important thinkers of his time and has had more impact on human history than the vast majority of people. If you haven't read and understood him (you can still disagree with him), you're just not someone who has anything worthwhile to say about politics. Marx viewed capitalism as a good development. He saw it as an inherently destructive system which would liquidate the existing remnants of feudal/aristocratic society and then destroy itself through its own excesses and contradictions. He thought that this destruction would pave the way for a more utopian system, and that was where he was naive imo.

This thread is a case study in what happens when people feel qualified to judge a theory they’ve never studied, never taken seriously, and in most cases, couldn’t summarize if their lives depended on it. Everyone here is performing certainty, not demonstrating understanding.

Let’s run it down.

Marx is called “irrational,” “a utopian,” “detached from reality,” and even compared to a religious cult leader. But if anyone here actually read him — I mean really read Capital, not just YouTube summaries and ideological hit jobs — you’d know Marx despised utopianism. He didn’t sketch dream worlds. He tore apart the material logic of capitalism with surgical precision. And I’m sure a few of you here have read at least some amount of his works, but it feels like a safe bet to state that most of you only have the surface level understanding of Marx and Communist philosophy.

He didn’t say, “Here’s how the world should be.” He said, “Here’s how it is. Here’s how it moves. Here’s who pays the price.”

And he was right.

The cycle of overproduction, crises, layoffs, imperialism, and exploitation isn’t some unlucky accident — it’s baked into capitalism’s DNA. Marx saw it over a century ago. We still live in it. The only thing irrational is pretending this system works for anyone but the owning class.

One post said Marx “never ran a lemonade stand.” No, he was too busy writing Capital — an analysis so detailed it predicted how small producers get crushed by large capital, how profit requires exploitation, and how “entrepreneurship” is usually just middlemen skimming off labor they don’t do. But sure, tell me more about lemonade.

Another post says Marx didn’t understand “human nature.” What a lazy phrase. There’s no single “human nature” — people behave differently depending on the systems they live in. Feudalism created one kind of subject. Capitalism creates another. People adapt to survive. That’s not nature, that’s structure. It is a fact though, that people hate being disconnected from their labor, being on a production line and never seeing the products you produced with your own hands getting used by somebody. They start to feel useless, like just a cog. That’s burnout. That’s alienation. Marx tagged it over a century ago and it’s hitting the US really hard now.

Then there’s the “it’s all just nonsense words” argument — the last resort of people who don’t know what a concept means. Marx’s terms are technical, yes — because he’s doing theory, not writing self-help. If you don’t understand surplus value, dialectical materialism, or the labor theory of value, fine — ask. Learn. But don’t confuse your confusion for proof of a flaw. That’s not critique. That’s intellectual cowardice.

Let’s not even waste time on the post comparing Marxism to “licking shit” — that kind of juvenile filth reveals more about the poster’s need to be edgy than about Marx. When your argument slips into schoolyard vulgarity, you’ve left the realm of debate.

Even the fairer critics here — the ones who call Marx “important but naive” — still miss the mark. Marx never said capitalism would magically evolve into socialism. He said the working class would have to fight for it — and that the ruling class would do everything in its power to stop them. History has proved that, too.

Now, I don’t speak for all Marxists or all communists. There are many schools of thought, debates, disagreements — real ones, not just insults in a forum thread. But I do speak from a place of study, not hearsay. And what I can say with confidence is this: most of what people think they “know” about Marxism has been filtered through a full century of propaganda — in your schools, your media, and even your entertainment.

This isn’t conspiracy theory. It’s public record. The CIA’s Operation Mockingbird openly placed agency assets inside major newsrooms throughout the Cold War to steer coverage against communism. U.S. school textbooks were purged of labor history and rewritten by think tanks funded by capitalist foundations — not to teach, but to protect profit. The very word “socialism” was smeared into meaninglessness by generations of deliberate disinformation.

You were trained to mock Marx before you ever read him. You were shown breadlines without being shown the embargoes that caused them. You were taught capitalism is “freedom,” even as wages stagnate, housing vanishes, and debt chains your future to the profits of the rich. You were told communism “kills,” but never asked how many millions capitalism has killed through war, poverty, hunger, or preventable disease.

So no — you’re not rebelling by mocking Marx. You’re reciting the lines they gave you.

What’s clear is this: none of you would be this hostile if Marx had nothing to say. You don’t froth at the mouth over irrelevant thinkers. You don’t obsess over failed ideas. You hate Marx because he understood your world better than you do, and because he offered the one thing the system fears most — a framework for its overthrow.

So don’t pretend this is about reason vs. irrationality. It’s about class. You’ve chosen yours. I’ve chosen mine.

And the class I stand with is still producing the wealth, still being exploited, still lashing out as our material conditions worsen, and still reading Marx — not because he was a prophet, but because he told the truth you’ve been trained not to hear.

Does anyone else think that  Proletariat is the real  LucyStarfire?

Never seen that kid write so long. Don't think so.

This is why I think it might be him:

Wouldn't be surprised tbh.