To be clear, Marx's economics were crap, his specific brand of historical materialism was crap, and he was wrong in almost all of his explanations and predictions. (This is why Gramsci, Lukacs, & Frankfurt.)

But these were not his lasting contributions anyhow.

A review thread:

2/ Again, the central contribution of Karl Marx—that which places him among Weber and Durkheim as the fathers of sociology—is not his specific critique of capitalism, his communist eschatology, nor even his apprehension of the striking social ills of his day, but rather

3/ his critique of the whole. The Enlightenment era which preceded Marx had sought to throw off the “tyranny” of the Church over ideology and the de facto authority of traditional metaphysics, replacing them with reason and rational justifications and explanations.

4/ It was a turn from the transcendent and dictated to the immanent and discoverable. Many had critiqued private property, capitalist markets, oppressive social orders, and the dismal conditions they were thought to produce, but Marx believed they had all failed to grasp their

5/ historical causes and preconditions.

Rather than look to this or that injustice or social ill, Marx examined the whole social order from its material roots. As Hegel had put Spirit/Mind as the central reality driving mankind through the dialectic of historical development,

6/ so Marx put material man and his material environment as the central and only historical reality driving the same. The basic conditions for human life, such as food, shelter, procreation, etc., are the wellspring of all man’s ideas, religions, sciences, and political and

7/ social philosophies.

For Marx, the current materials and means of production necessarily determine the mode of production; in turn, the mode of production—like slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism—necessarily produce the ideas and ethics of the society.

8/ Thus, as one sees poverty, war, subjugation, oppression, whatever, the cause and solutions are not ultimately to be found in the ideology per se, nor even in the believed and stated motivations of social actors, but in the underlying system of relations operating at the

9/ brass-tacks level of human existence—the “ensemble of social relations” produced necessarily by the means and modes of production of human life. And as per the nature of dialectic, the tensions within the “ensemble” not only lead to dysfunction and misery, but also contain

10/ within them the immanent solutions that such crises will inexorably realize, driving humanity forward toward final resolution and utopia.

Now, it is nearly universally agreed that his eschatology was unsound, his failed predictions disproving many of his theories, and

11/ the very idea of "dialectic" is used as lottle more than a metaphor anymore, nevertheless the method of his social critique has lasting value.

For example, Marx argued that the central cause of infant mortality was not lack of money or underfunded hospitals, but a system

12/ of production that treats individuals as mere objects of the social calculus of capital formation. This is an important take and is often the correct way to understand widespread social ills. At least IMO. It is often important to realize that an “event” is just an immanent

13/ artifact of the social system that produced it. 

It is undoubtedly appropriate to study how our ideas and enjoyments are shaped by our daily economic activities, to acknowledge how all of life can be infected by “commodity fetish,” to agree with, e.g., Neil Postman’s

14/ critique of the culture industry in Amusing Ourselves to Death, to speak of a “culture of death,” the “sexual revolution,” the “pornification of society” (as evangelicals certainly do), and even to see that current disparities along the “color-line” have resulted from

15/ powerful historically entrenched institutions and thought patterns, that 1492 and 1619 have a lot to do with 2019, or that a single event, such as the murder of Trayvon Martin, can expose an whole historical narrative.

16/ Anyhow, I'm just sayin' that I'm not willing to lump every idea that has some link to Marx's approach to sociology and toss them all into the waste bin of history.

17/17 Though I'd NEVER wholesale endorse Marxism, Communism, or many of Marx's important ideas, I'm nevertheless also beginning to cringe when I see uncritical wholesale rejection of anything smacking if Marx, even by allies.

Just some thoughts.

*of