Marx did have some important insights, and it is a mistake to reject him wholesale. Where Marxists go wrong is in believing that one can jump start history and move directly to a utopian society. Marx was fundamentally a Hegelian and predicted that society would eventually progress through a tedious dialectical process with each step forward being the result of a rise in social consciousness. If we look at just at how our general view of the role of government has evolved since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, one can see this and extrapolate where we will be in the future. But again, the common error is to assume that by bloody revolution, or something similar, we can can skip over the intermediate stages. We cannot. Societal consciousness has to evolve naturally, perhaps over hundreds of years.
“Where Marxists go wrong is in believing that one can jump start history and move directly to a utopian society.”
I agree that Marx had important insights, the best of which was the enormous influence of economics on driving society and history. But “jump-starting history” was Lenin’s Bolshevik program, essentially a heresy of Marxism. Marx had it that “stages” defined by a dominant economic method (like Feudalism or Capitalism) pass away organically when the productive potential of the stage has been maximized and wealth concentrated in so fews hands that economics ceased to work. It’s true though, that Marx got so wee-weed up by the Paris Commune that he wished away his own principles.