>>24699347
It's also how he wrote about his opponents. He had an intolerant side (not as bad as Lenin though) and sneered at Bakunin and Proudhon and everyone who he considered a rival as unscientific. Now that might have been true but Marx is also saying: this is not my opinion, it's science. You can't argue with science, bitch! Marx is a vast panopoly of stuff but there's a lot of that in it.

Marx was brilliant though and I think if he discovered any "law," then (this is my own take) it's that as societies enter in contact with each other, they compete, and the societies that are best able to increase social productivity will do better, and the ones which do not will lag behind, and if that gap increases enough then that starts to raise the question of whether the society that has fallen behind will continue to exist. They'll go extinct or be conquered or otherwise exit "history." And since societies don't willingly let that happen to themselves, there will be movements that emerge to either reform the political "superstructure" of their society or scrap it for a new one to enable it to develop the productive forces. There's a struggle that ensues there and it could end up in government reforms (pretty common), a full-blown social revolution (very rare), or a complete disaster and civil war which destroys the country ("the common ruin of the contending classes") or some combination of these things. But it doesn't necessarily imply that the contending classes will adopt a particular ideology like Marxism.

That's more open-ended and events can actually be paradoxical in all kinds of ways, like just look at the Arab Spring, then the Syrian Civil War, and now there's a new Syrian government which seems to be adopting a kind of economically liberal "business Islam" influenced by trends from the Gulf. Those are all things that happened in the real world, so now how does one apply "Marxism" (or a scientific-like and materialist framework) to analyze that, the social classes involved, and so forth, which is a more interesting question to me than some slogans and symbols.