What would Karl Marx think about the failure of real socialism?

Theodor Adorno kicked off his "three studies on Hegel" with this little nudge to all the philosophers working in his era—basically saying we’re doing it all wrong. Instead of obsessing over stuff like, "What's left of his ideas?" or "Which parts of his books are still useful today?", he thought we should be asking what these giants would actually say about our current world if they were sitting right here with us. It's about using their eyes to see the present, you know? Like looking through a vintage lens at a modern cityscape.

So, let's try applying that kind of thinking to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. We already have a pretty good idea of what thinkers like Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, and Erich Fromm thought about the Soviet Union, and we can look at how folks like Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Slavoj Žižek view things nowadays—but let's pivot. What would the original duo, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, actually make of that specific Bolshevik version of socialism? I mean, sure, they loved a good "critique of everything existing," but I'm talking about the real-world application. How would they react to it specifically?

I bet Karl Marx would argue that anyone who tried to turn his philosophical works into a blueprint got it all wrong. To him, his ideas aren't tools you apply; they just eventually manifest themselves... sooner or later.

He’d probably also think he nailed the reality of the situation. Since he was such a historicist and an essentialist, he wasn't one to budge on his theories—if the data didn't match his predictions, then the data was clearly the problem.

In my view, he’d say it’s just a matter of waiting for his prophecy about the end of history to actually play out. He’d insist the core logic remains untouched and totally monolithic, maybe just admitting he was a little off on the timeline...

But hey, that’s just me speculating based on what we know about how those totalizing minds work.

Karl Marx wasn't an essentialist—not by a long shot. His whole pivot from idealism to materialism basically flips the script on the Hegelian logical relationship between being and becoming. To me, essentialism assumes that "being" is the bedrock of existence, which is really just a textbook idealist postulate. Marx, on the other hand, argued that existence has to come before being—meaning history itself had to exist before we could even come up with the concept of historicity. That makes him a totally different kind of historicist than Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. It’s simple: if the actual empirical evidence doesn't match our preconceived notions of what historicity looks like, then we don't actually understand the essence of history at all. This tendency to ignore empirical data? That's a leftover from Hegel, not Marx. The core distinction here is really just the gap between idealism and materialism—or, if you want to get technical, the divide between nominalism and essentialism.

I honestly feel like we're suffering from a massive surplus of Popperian errors here.

Megan Wilson2 said:Karl Marx wasn't an essentialist—not by a long shot. His whole pivot from idealism to materialism basically flips the script on the Hegelian logical relationship between being and becoming. To me, essentialism assumes that "being" is the bedrock of existence, which is really just a textbook idealist postulate. Marx, on the other hand, argued that existence has to come before being—meaning history itself had to exist before we could even come up with the concept of historicity. That makes him a totally different kind of historicist than Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. It’s simple: if the actual empirical evidence doesn't match our preconceived notions of what historicity looks like, then we don't actually understand the essence of history at all. This tendency to ignore empirical data? That's a leftover from Hegel, not Marx. The core distinction here is really just the gap between idealism and materialism—or, if you want to get technical, the divide between nominalism and essentialism.

I honestly feel like we're suffering from a massive surplus of Popperian errors here.

You're saying essentialism inherently treats being as the basis of existence, making it a total idealistic postulate.

Being is, if I'm reading you right, that thing that makes something what it is and prevents it from being anything else—the part that resists change and stays constant.

You claim Marx isn't an essentialist. Sure, you could argue that since practice isn't predetermined and humans shape it themselves—thereby molding their own nature and consciousness—it leaves no room for essentialism.

But isn't Marx's idea of "practice" just an empty vessel waiting to be filled with different content? And isn't the core idea that labor defines a human being deeply essentialist? Doesn't that imply existence is already steered toward a specific being that predetermines it? If so, can't a person not change that direction? Doesn't that mean being still precedes existence after all... making him an essentialist?

I don't think so—mostly because Karl Marx defined essence in a way that’s fundamentally different from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. You're right that he never actually denied that essence exists; his whole core premise rests on viewing humans as the architects of their own history and the creators of their own means of production, which implies certain universal human attributes. But unlike Hegel, he didn't see this essence as some immutable thing without which a person couldn't exist as a human being—rather, he saw it as empirically being the general attributes of human existence. It's basically his thesis regarding Ludwig Feuerbach, right?

We're talking about an essence that isn't fixed or eternal—which makes it totally different from what you'd find in Hegel or in Platonic thought (which are pretty much the same thing, if you ask me). Marx actually predicted that all these attributes would eventually dissolve once a classless society emerges; there wouldn't be "history" for humans to create anymore, and labor wouldn't mean what it does today because work and leisure would just sort of merge into one thing, etc.

If empirical facts turned out to show the opposite, I doubt Marx would have ever stopped believing that essence exists, but he definitely would have said, "Well, look at that—turns out that wasn't our true essence!" and then he'd just pivot and keep philosophizing through a brand new lens. At the end of the day, philosophy is always going to be this restless search for essence, whether you happen to be an essentialist or a nominalist.

Karl Marx might have thrown his support behind Leon Trotsky, but as the author of Das Kapital, he would've known deep down that it wouldn't actually pan out. We really need a few more massive scientific and technological revolutions—the kind that deliver entirely new, cheaper materials, energy sources, or processes, or maybe just some radical new inventions—to finally create the conditions necessary to shift away from capitalism. Right now, you're looking at somewhere like Canada, where about 51% of the workforce holds a college degree, and even there, most other places fall well below that level.
Karl Marx was easily the biggest techno-optimist among the intellectuals of his era, yet even he couldn't have possibly anticipated the sheer scale of the technological boom we've seen since his time.