“It has been made clear, in the last hundred years, the Market Place is much closer attuned to reality than is the Marxist Place.”
Kipling was critizing the gods of the market place - the faddish gods, the gods of the tastes of the moment.
I agree that his poem should be the anthem of conservatism.
His last stanza is very prophetic and we’re living it.
Perhaps.
But gods of the Marxist place fit better.
Hard to see the gods of the fashionable "promising perpetual peace". Marxists do exactly that.
Hard to see gods of the fashionable promising to rob Peter to pay for collectivist Paul. Exactly what Socialist/Marxists do.
Both fit to some extant, promising that two and two do not make four. In 1919, the Marxists were a bit more hard-headed than are the cultural Marxists today, which promise and preach that reality is optional.