Bingo, QED. As I've said before, Marx's thought is the moralism that dare not speak its name. Marx was 100 percent in the Old Testament tradition of a fire-and-brimstone-spouting prophet denouncing a corrupt society for refusing to honor the Golden Rule. To make that moralistic tradition relevant to the the arch-rational Victorian era, he erected a great clanking engine of scientific economic principles to frighten the bourgies and convince them he was no mere hand-wringing parson begging for a bit more charity in the world.
The irony, IMO, is that Marx succeeded mainly in adding a new type of alienation to the capitalist world. The very complexity of Marx's thought, though impressive as science, serves to reduce the transparency of capitalism's abominations. You shouldn't have to *study* Marx or anybody to grasp that the the existing economic order is contrary to moral law. Yet, instead of being told to trust their intuitions and recognize the system as a horror, the masses have traditionally been led to believe they must "do the reading" and, through arduous study of Marx, understand all the wiring diagrams of the system in order to appreciate how awful it is. That's a formula for disaster in terms of practical politics.
Ultimately, I think Marx has done more than anyone else to disenfranchise the masses from their visceral outrage and slow the progress of socialism in the world.
Carl
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