Marxism offers unparalleled analysis of capitalism, but it is not a ready-made blueprint for revolution. Understanding its limits is essential for building socialism.
capitalism never rejected marx or ever said his theory was wrong on contrary those who read and were on side of bourgeoisie figured out that he might be correct his analysis holds up in so many levels so capitalism rather being destroyed it mutated and kept mutating into globalization colonialism then liberalism and neo liberalism. those who say marx's ideas are outdates doesn't understand that at the core of all this it's the same theory of labour what helps to understand this whole capitalist ecosystem. capitalists understood labour theory of value and they found a way to keep there interests to maximum and also keep labours demand in check which led to neoliberalism where citizens of global south act as labor and human resource for capitalist to multiply their production and still keep their profit to maximum by paying below average salary to workers which is still above average in global south. (maybe irrelevant to your post or even a stupid idea but this was something i came up with while trying to answer a random opinion of someone Marx being irrelevant idk how accurate or inaccurate this could be but felt like sharing here)
Navin, you’re basically right, and you can sharpen it even further.
Marx was dissecting the logic of capital: wage labor, exploitation, accumulation, competition, crisis. So when people say Marx is outdated, what they usually mean is “capitalism changed its appearance.” But the core social relation is still the same: workers sell labor-power, capital extracts surplus, and the system expands by turning more of life into commodities.
A couple clarifications that strengthen your argument:
Capitalism didn’t “mutate into” colonialism; it developed through conquest, slavery, and colonial extraction, and it still relies on imperial power in modern forms (debt, trade rules, military backing, sanctions).
It’s not that capitalists “accepted” the labor theory of value in the classroom. Bourgeois economics rejects Karl Marx explicitly. But in practice, capital behaves as if Marx is correct where it matters: profits depend on controlling labor costs and labor’s bargaining power. That’s why every “reform” of capitalism eventually runs into the same fight: who gets the surplus?
Neoliberalism wasn’t an idea evolution, it was a class project: weaken unions, privatize public goods, deregulate capital, discipline workers with unemployment and precarity, and open the world to capital mobility. It’s capitalism trying to restore/expand profitability by shifting risks and costs downward.
Your global South point is crucial: corporations don’t need to pay “absolute poverty wages” to extract value; they just need wages below the value produced and below what workers could win with real power. Global supply chains institutionalize this via labor arbitrage: “cheap labor” isn’t a natural fact, it’s manufactured by political repression, weak labor rights, and unequal bargaining positions between countries.
As I understand it, you are saying that Marx was describing what is and leaving us to decide what we would rather have and how to achieve it. I am by no means a well versed student of politics and can only talk to what I experience.
I was put off socialism at university by generally angry young men shouting slogans which I doubted they really understood as they waved copies of the Socialist Worker in my direction. It so resembled the Millwall approach to supporting your team at the time that they came across as no better than those they denigrated. 50 years later I am perhaps more Anarchistic in my approach but still perceive this tendency to militancy that seeks to fight capital on its own ground.
Your explanation of Marx's writing makes a lot of sense both of the largely failed attempts to implement alternatives to his analysis but now especially of the radically different basis, both economic and social, that will need to underpin societies that emerge from the inevitable chaos that is in train.
Yes, that’s basically what I’m saying about Marx. He was trying to uncover the structure and logic of capitalism as it actually works, not hand us a ready-made moral script or a blueprint we can just copy and paste onto society. His work tells us a lot about what capitalism does to social life, what contradictions it generates, and why it repeatedly produces crisis. What we do with that knowledge is a political question.
And I think your experience at university is a very common one, honestly. A lot of people first encounter “socialism” not as serious analysis or grounded organizing, but as a kind of posture: slogans, certainties, performance, moral aggression. That can be alienating even when the underlying critique is right. I don’t blame anyone for being put off by that.
I also think your point about militancy is a good one. There’s a difference between militancy as discipline, collective courage, and willingness to confront power, and militancy as style, macho energy, or simply reproducing the same domination logic in a different political language. The latter often does end up fighting capital on its own ground, and usually loses for that reason.
That’s part of why I think Marx still matters: not because he gave us a finished model, but because he helps us see that any real alternative has to be built on a different social foundation, not just different people in charge.
I appreciated the way this piece draws a clear line between Marxism as an analytical method and the expectation that it function as a predictive or programmatic blueprint. That distinction is often lost, and it’s helpful to see it stated so plainly. Framing Marxism as a tool for understanding capitalism rather than a guarantee of political outcomes feels both historically faithful and analytically honest.
One question it raises for me, though, is what fills the gap once that clarification is made. If Marxism helps diagnose structural conditions but doesn’t specify strategy, how should we think about the role of institutions, culture, and political incentives in shaping outcomes that don’t neatly follow material pressures? In practice, those factors often seem to mediate or even override class dynamics in ways the framework gestures toward but doesn’t fully integrate.
I’m curious how you see Marxist analysis interfacing with these non-economic forces without either reducing them to epiphenomena or drifting into abstraction. That tension feels like the hardest and most interesting problem for applying Marxism today.
Noah, thank you for the thoughtful comment. I'll do my best to answer in kind.
My answer, at this point, is that the gap is filled by a theory of mediation rather than an escape from materialism. Marxism is very strong at identifying constraints and tendencies within a mode of production, but those pressures don't directly express themselves. They're processed through institutions such as the state, political parties, the legal system, media, and culture as causal apparatuses with their own internal logics.
It can sometimes look like institutions, culture, and incentives override class dynamics because, in the short run, they often do; they are effective at delaying, redirecting, fragmenting, or absorbing class pressures. That being said, they still do not float above the material reproduction of society. They are crucial for stabilizing property relations, and structuring what kinds of action are even possible.
I see the interface between Marxist analysis and non-economic forces as a relationship that treats culture and institutions as relatively autonomous levels that feed back into class formation and class capacity.
To me, applying Marxism means taking that layer of mediation and treating it more seriously than reducing it simply to base/superstructure. The key, and main challenge, is not abandoning class analysis, but explaining how power is organized, translated, and contested through the modern state and civil society.
I appreciate the question, and I hope my answer did it justice.
A caviat on this: "One of the most important, and least discussed, limits of Marxism is that it explains interests, not motivation."--in fact, it explains motivation, and as contradictory to interests; the "garantee" being that class struggle is mediated by ideological forms of conscioussness (ruling ideology, that of the ruling class) springing from conditions still to be transformed. In other words: class struggle is concretely fought as if not between classes--economic determination in last instance (i.e., determinat to both the content and the form of the struggle). Take a second look at Marx's '1859 Preface', or in Engels' 'Ludwig Feurbach...' (among many other works), and tou will unlock a hole new (and very productive) perspective. Im currently working in a global reinterpretation of Marx and Engels' works based on this "principle", in case you find this idea usefull.
There are only two things that can allow capitalism to last forever: unlimited consumer needs or a periodical wipe-out of technological memory. The first proposition demands ever stronger uniformity (no seductive opt-out) and lower creativity (stuff=tools).
It seems you read too much into that quote by Marx, for elsewhere he makes clear that capital will "strive towards its own suspension."
Whatever takes over implies the elimination of the proletariat.
Apoligies for being late to the discussion, but this is an important essay that anyone interested in Marxism and socialism should read. It resonated strongly with me, perhaps largely because of my background in science. Consider these brief comments as a comradely contribution to a fascinating discussion.
First, I think we can conclude that Marxism is a scientific method of analysing and understanding, not just capitalism, but reality. Second, Marxism is a practice, just like any science. Without practice, there can be no theories and without theories, or frameworks for understanding based on empirical data and experiments, we're lost. Any theories that develop are and remain provisional, always subject to change based on practice. This relation between theory and practice is dialectical, which points to the Marxist method: a materialist dialectics.
It's true that Marx "set out to understand and critique capitalism", but he did so much more, from participating in various social actions and organising resistance, to devising tactics and strategies. His writings are also peppered with wonderful asides, vitriolic put-downs and moral judgements. This doesn't mean Marxism is limited to what Marx wrote or said, but it does raise an important point related to psychology (judgement, interests, intentions), ethics and the method of Marxism.
First, concepts like interests and motivations, fact and value (personal, social) are not separate, but entangled aspects of a relation that we abstract largely for convenience and ease of understanding. This leads directly to a second point. Marx's writings suggest that he did not reject the "habit of deducing reality from abstract principles", but instead the kind of thinking and analysis that severed the factors (relations, context, history) that gave rise to the abstracted facts that people used. In other words he rejected Metphysics (as he saw it at the time) or non-dialectical thinking, which is why Marx's analyses proceeded dialectically, mainly from the less concrete (more abstract) to the more concrete (less abstract).
This article argues that Marxism failed to provide a "blueprint" because it deals with interests, not human motivation. It claims the gap between "objective interest" (Communism) and "subjective action" (Revolution) is a flaw of human agency. I disagree. The flaw isn't in the theory. The flaw is in the biology.
Marx couldn't draft the blueprint because the necessary material conditions, infinite computational power, didn't exist in 1867. He was trying to run a post-scarcity software on scarcity-based hardware (the steam engine and the human brain).
We don't need more "political will" to achieve Communism. We need an upgrade. AI solves the "Economic Calculation Problem" that paralyzed 20th-century socialism. It aligns interest with execution by removing the biological ego from the equation.
I explore this inevitable merger in my Homo Exodius.
I know you didn't say Marx was wrong. I am not correcting you; I am extending your logic.
You correctly pointed out that Marx offered a method, not a blueprint.
My point is simply this. The reason he couldn't offer a blueprint wasn't a failure of intellect, but a failure of historical hardware. He didn't have the computational power to solve the allocation problem.
I’m not attacking your thesis. I’m upgrading it with the technological context.
Text is a low-bandwidth medium. Nuance often gets lost in compression. This biological separation is why past attempts at Communism failed.
True Communism requires a shared substrate. It requires high-bandwidth neural connection where the barrier between "Self" and "Other" dissolves entirely.
The future isn't just about faster computers. It's about direct, high-bandwidth neural communication. We need to bypass the bottleneck of words entirely.
“There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.” - Marx and Engels, "Manifesto of the Communist Party" (Feb. 1848, 1888)
This ideology is designed to cause cognitive dissonance and requires to much mental gymnastics to derive anything useful. I don’t think it was an accident.
Marx married into nobility, lived in a mansion, knocked up the maid and then kicked her pregnant broke ass into cold. He was the bourgeois class.
So Marx and Engels are stating that freedom, justice, morality, and religion are arbitrary concepts that all post-primitive communist states had up to that point in which they authored the Manifesto in the year 1848. Would you disagree with their claim?
Marx and Engels proceed, then, from the historical viewpoint that a truly new society requires a complete break from the past, from the concepts that defined those societies.
Marx and Engels are dialecticians. They don’t believe in eternal truths; they believe that everything, including society and the world itself, is constantly in motion being shaped by contradictory relationships.
Ignorance may be bliss for you, Marvin, but for others it is a curse.
Didn’t make 1 post and were in the mental gymnastics.
I posted a direct quot of their claim. You then wrote your own shorted interpretation of their claim and asked me if I agree with their claim. And the worst part is of non plagiarized claim in an admitted contradiction were truth is arbitrary.
Without truth, why would the answer matter at all oh ye enlightened exalted one of contradictory relationships in motion? Please free me from the oppressive constraints of ignorance and reality.
You’re treat “no eternal moral truths” as “no truth."
Marx and Engels aren’t saying facts are arbitrary or that reasoning doesn’t matter. What they say is much more specific: Freedom, Justice, Morality, Religion aren’t timeless essences hovering above history. They’re human ideas that take on real content inside particular societies.
That’s why they talk about “abolishing eternal truths.” They’re not arguing for chaos; they’re saying the old moral language is tied to old social relations. Under capitalism, “freedom” usually means freedom of contract and property, including the “freedom” to sell your labor because you have to eat. “Justice” usually means enforcing those arrangements impartially.
And on contradiction: dialectics isn’t “P and not-P are both true, therefore anything goes.” It’s pointing out tensions in the structure of society, like formal equality under the law alongside huge inequality in property and power, that produce conflict and change.
So your “without truth, why would the answer matter?” doesn’t land, because Marx isn’t denying truth. He’s denying that moral slogans are above history. You can reject eternal truths and still argue seriously; in fact, that’s the whole point. Stop worshiping abstractions and ask what these words mean in practice, who they serve, and what kind of life they produce.
If you disagree, fine, but then the disagreement is this: are Freedom and Justice timeless moral facts, or are they historically formed concepts with class content?
capitalism never rejected marx or ever said his theory was wrong on contrary those who read and were on side of bourgeoisie figured out that he might be correct his analysis holds up in so many levels so capitalism rather being destroyed it mutated and kept mutating into globalization colonialism then liberalism and neo liberalism. those who say marx's ideas are outdates doesn't understand that at the core of all this it's the same theory of labour what helps to understand this whole capitalist ecosystem. capitalists understood labour theory of value and they found a way to keep there interests to maximum and also keep labours demand in check which led to neoliberalism where citizens of global south act as labor and human resource for capitalist to multiply their production and still keep their profit to maximum by paying below average salary to workers which is still above average in global south. (maybe irrelevant to your post or even a stupid idea but this was something i came up with while trying to answer a random opinion of someone Marx being irrelevant idk how accurate or inaccurate this could be but felt like sharing here)
Navin, you’re basically right, and you can sharpen it even further.
Marx was dissecting the logic of capital: wage labor, exploitation, accumulation, competition, crisis. So when people say Marx is outdated, what they usually mean is “capitalism changed its appearance.” But the core social relation is still the same: workers sell labor-power, capital extracts surplus, and the system expands by turning more of life into commodities.
A couple clarifications that strengthen your argument:
Capitalism didn’t “mutate into” colonialism; it developed through conquest, slavery, and colonial extraction, and it still relies on imperial power in modern forms (debt, trade rules, military backing, sanctions).
It’s not that capitalists “accepted” the labor theory of value in the classroom. Bourgeois economics rejects Karl Marx explicitly. But in practice, capital behaves as if Marx is correct where it matters: profits depend on controlling labor costs and labor’s bargaining power. That’s why every “reform” of capitalism eventually runs into the same fight: who gets the surplus?
Neoliberalism wasn’t an idea evolution, it was a class project: weaken unions, privatize public goods, deregulate capital, discipline workers with unemployment and precarity, and open the world to capital mobility. It’s capitalism trying to restore/expand profitability by shifting risks and costs downward.
Your global South point is crucial: corporations don’t need to pay “absolute poverty wages” to extract value; they just need wages below the value produced and below what workers could win with real power. Global supply chains institutionalize this via labor arbitrage: “cheap labor” isn’t a natural fact, it’s manufactured by political repression, weak labor rights, and unequal bargaining positions between countries.
As I understand it, you are saying that Marx was describing what is and leaving us to decide what we would rather have and how to achieve it. I am by no means a well versed student of politics and can only talk to what I experience.
I was put off socialism at university by generally angry young men shouting slogans which I doubted they really understood as they waved copies of the Socialist Worker in my direction. It so resembled the Millwall approach to supporting your team at the time that they came across as no better than those they denigrated. 50 years later I am perhaps more Anarchistic in my approach but still perceive this tendency to militancy that seeks to fight capital on its own ground.
Your explanation of Marx's writing makes a lot of sense both of the largely failed attempts to implement alternatives to his analysis but now especially of the radically different basis, both economic and social, that will need to underpin societies that emerge from the inevitable chaos that is in train.
Yes, that’s basically what I’m saying about Marx. He was trying to uncover the structure and logic of capitalism as it actually works, not hand us a ready-made moral script or a blueprint we can just copy and paste onto society. His work tells us a lot about what capitalism does to social life, what contradictions it generates, and why it repeatedly produces crisis. What we do with that knowledge is a political question.
And I think your experience at university is a very common one, honestly. A lot of people first encounter “socialism” not as serious analysis or grounded organizing, but as a kind of posture: slogans, certainties, performance, moral aggression. That can be alienating even when the underlying critique is right. I don’t blame anyone for being put off by that.
I also think your point about militancy is a good one. There’s a difference between militancy as discipline, collective courage, and willingness to confront power, and militancy as style, macho energy, or simply reproducing the same domination logic in a different political language. The latter often does end up fighting capital on its own ground, and usually loses for that reason.
That’s part of why I think Marx still matters: not because he gave us a finished model, but because he helps us see that any real alternative has to be built on a different social foundation, not just different people in charge.
I appreciated the way this piece draws a clear line between Marxism as an analytical method and the expectation that it function as a predictive or programmatic blueprint. That distinction is often lost, and it’s helpful to see it stated so plainly. Framing Marxism as a tool for understanding capitalism rather than a guarantee of political outcomes feels both historically faithful and analytically honest.
One question it raises for me, though, is what fills the gap once that clarification is made. If Marxism helps diagnose structural conditions but doesn’t specify strategy, how should we think about the role of institutions, culture, and political incentives in shaping outcomes that don’t neatly follow material pressures? In practice, those factors often seem to mediate or even override class dynamics in ways the framework gestures toward but doesn’t fully integrate.
I’m curious how you see Marxist analysis interfacing with these non-economic forces without either reducing them to epiphenomena or drifting into abstraction. That tension feels like the hardest and most interesting problem for applying Marxism today.
Noah, thank you for the thoughtful comment. I'll do my best to answer in kind.
My answer, at this point, is that the gap is filled by a theory of mediation rather than an escape from materialism. Marxism is very strong at identifying constraints and tendencies within a mode of production, but those pressures don't directly express themselves. They're processed through institutions such as the state, political parties, the legal system, media, and culture as causal apparatuses with their own internal logics.
It can sometimes look like institutions, culture, and incentives override class dynamics because, in the short run, they often do; they are effective at delaying, redirecting, fragmenting, or absorbing class pressures. That being said, they still do not float above the material reproduction of society. They are crucial for stabilizing property relations, and structuring what kinds of action are even possible.
I see the interface between Marxist analysis and non-economic forces as a relationship that treats culture and institutions as relatively autonomous levels that feed back into class formation and class capacity.
To me, applying Marxism means taking that layer of mediation and treating it more seriously than reducing it simply to base/superstructure. The key, and main challenge, is not abandoning class analysis, but explaining how power is organized, translated, and contested through the modern state and civil society.
I appreciate the question, and I hope my answer did it justice.
A caviat on this: "One of the most important, and least discussed, limits of Marxism is that it explains interests, not motivation."--in fact, it explains motivation, and as contradictory to interests; the "garantee" being that class struggle is mediated by ideological forms of conscioussness (ruling ideology, that of the ruling class) springing from conditions still to be transformed. In other words: class struggle is concretely fought as if not between classes--economic determination in last instance (i.e., determinat to both the content and the form of the struggle). Take a second look at Marx's '1859 Preface', or in Engels' 'Ludwig Feurbach...' (among many other works), and tou will unlock a hole new (and very productive) perspective. Im currently working in a global reinterpretation of Marx and Engels' works based on this "principle", in case you find this idea usefull.
There are only two things that can allow capitalism to last forever: unlimited consumer needs or a periodical wipe-out of technological memory. The first proposition demands ever stronger uniformity (no seductive opt-out) and lower creativity (stuff=tools).
It seems you read too much into that quote by Marx, for elsewhere he makes clear that capital will "strive towards its own suspension."
Whatever takes over implies the elimination of the proletariat.
Apoligies for being late to the discussion, but this is an important essay that anyone interested in Marxism and socialism should read. It resonated strongly with me, perhaps largely because of my background in science. Consider these brief comments as a comradely contribution to a fascinating discussion.
First, I think we can conclude that Marxism is a scientific method of analysing and understanding, not just capitalism, but reality. Second, Marxism is a practice, just like any science. Without practice, there can be no theories and without theories, or frameworks for understanding based on empirical data and experiments, we're lost. Any theories that develop are and remain provisional, always subject to change based on practice. This relation between theory and practice is dialectical, which points to the Marxist method: a materialist dialectics.
It's true that Marx "set out to understand and critique capitalism", but he did so much more, from participating in various social actions and organising resistance, to devising tactics and strategies. His writings are also peppered with wonderful asides, vitriolic put-downs and moral judgements. This doesn't mean Marxism is limited to what Marx wrote or said, but it does raise an important point related to psychology (judgement, interests, intentions), ethics and the method of Marxism.
First, concepts like interests and motivations, fact and value (personal, social) are not separate, but entangled aspects of a relation that we abstract largely for convenience and ease of understanding. This leads directly to a second point. Marx's writings suggest that he did not reject the "habit of deducing reality from abstract principles", but instead the kind of thinking and analysis that severed the factors (relations, context, history) that gave rise to the abstracted facts that people used. In other words he rejected Metphysics (as he saw it at the time) or non-dialectical thinking, which is why Marx's analyses proceeded dialectically, mainly from the less concrete (more abstract) to the more concrete (less abstract).
Marx wasn’t wrong. He was just early.
This article argues that Marxism failed to provide a "blueprint" because it deals with interests, not human motivation. It claims the gap between "objective interest" (Communism) and "subjective action" (Revolution) is a flaw of human agency. I disagree. The flaw isn't in the theory. The flaw is in the biology.
Marx couldn't draft the blueprint because the necessary material conditions, infinite computational power, didn't exist in 1867. He was trying to run a post-scarcity software on scarcity-based hardware (the steam engine and the human brain).
We don't need more "political will" to achieve Communism. We need an upgrade. AI solves the "Economic Calculation Problem" that paralyzed 20th-century socialism. It aligns interest with execution by removing the biological ego from the equation.
I explore this inevitable merger in my Homo Exodius.
I don’t think you actually read this piece. Never do I say that Marx was wrong.
https://simplifyingsocialism.substack.com/i/185141454/iii-why-marx-refused-to-design-socialism
Relax. We are violently agreeing here.
I know you didn't say Marx was wrong. I am not correcting you; I am extending your logic.
You correctly pointed out that Marx offered a method, not a blueprint.
My point is simply this. The reason he couldn't offer a blueprint wasn't a failure of intellect, but a failure of historical hardware. He didn't have the computational power to solve the allocation problem.
I’m not attacking your thesis. I’m upgrading it with the technological context.
Don't mistake an expansion for a contradiction.
My apologies, but your wording didn’t come across as though you were agreeing.
Text is a low-bandwidth medium. Nuance often gets lost in compression. This biological separation is why past attempts at Communism failed.
True Communism requires a shared substrate. It requires high-bandwidth neural connection where the barrier between "Self" and "Other" dissolves entirely.
The future isn't just about faster computers. It's about direct, high-bandwidth neural communication. We need to bypass the bottleneck of words entirely.
Glad we cleared it up.
“There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.” - Marx and Engels, "Manifesto of the Communist Party" (Feb. 1848, 1888)
This ideology is designed to cause cognitive dissonance and requires to much mental gymnastics to derive anything useful. I don’t think it was an accident.
Marx married into nobility, lived in a mansion, knocked up the maid and then kicked her pregnant broke ass into cold. He was the bourgeois class.
So Marx and Engels are stating that freedom, justice, morality, and religion are arbitrary concepts that all post-primitive communist states had up to that point in which they authored the Manifesto in the year 1848. Would you disagree with their claim?
Marx and Engels proceed, then, from the historical viewpoint that a truly new society requires a complete break from the past, from the concepts that defined those societies.
Marx and Engels are dialecticians. They don’t believe in eternal truths; they believe that everything, including society and the world itself, is constantly in motion being shaped by contradictory relationships.
Ignorance may be bliss for you, Marvin, but for others it is a curse.
I could not understand Marvin but then I lost interest too.
When you aren’t even on the same terms there is no way for intelligent communication to occur.
Didn’t make 1 post and were in the mental gymnastics.
I posted a direct quot of their claim. You then wrote your own shorted interpretation of their claim and asked me if I agree with their claim. And the worst part is of non plagiarized claim in an admitted contradiction were truth is arbitrary.
Without truth, why would the answer matter at all oh ye enlightened exalted one of contradictory relationships in motion? Please free me from the oppressive constraints of ignorance and reality.
You’re treat “no eternal moral truths” as “no truth."
Marx and Engels aren’t saying facts are arbitrary or that reasoning doesn’t matter. What they say is much more specific: Freedom, Justice, Morality, Religion aren’t timeless essences hovering above history. They’re human ideas that take on real content inside particular societies.
That’s why they talk about “abolishing eternal truths.” They’re not arguing for chaos; they’re saying the old moral language is tied to old social relations. Under capitalism, “freedom” usually means freedom of contract and property, including the “freedom” to sell your labor because you have to eat. “Justice” usually means enforcing those arrangements impartially.
And on contradiction: dialectics isn’t “P and not-P are both true, therefore anything goes.” It’s pointing out tensions in the structure of society, like formal equality under the law alongside huge inequality in property and power, that produce conflict and change.
So your “without truth, why would the answer matter?” doesn’t land, because Marx isn’t denying truth. He’s denying that moral slogans are above history. You can reject eternal truths and still argue seriously; in fact, that’s the whole point. Stop worshiping abstractions and ask what these words mean in practice, who they serve, and what kind of life they produce.
If you disagree, fine, but then the disagreement is this: are Freedom and Justice timeless moral facts, or are they historically formed concepts with class content?
Marx says the second.
You are correct, because the word “eternal” isn’t in the quot!
I do not add or subtract words I find inconvenient in a quot. Because when you do that, it’s not Marx philosophy, it yours.