Marx's argument in the end will be for the working class to rise up and take control. He believed that this would be the path to a single class society, when the means of production are controlled by the people who themselves toil on said production.
Even if a revolutionary, altruistic vanguard can seize power and not fall prey to Acton's observation, even if: there is still the nasty problem of transfer of power. Bureaucracy happens; lessons not acquired via first-hand struggle are difficult to propagate to the youth.
Consider the secular Jews of the United States, who seem awful asleep at the switch while we brew our own tyranny right at home. [And that oblique comparison is served totally non-partisan, by the way.]
If anybody shouldn't be sucking up to the oligarchs, it's those guys.
Compare what has actually been done to what Marx aspired to do.
This is my point, precisely. We haven't gotten to Marx's ideals yet, but anybody subscribing to Edenic thinking in our post-Eden world is kinda far out.
Remember the Marxist ideal - which arguably has never been pursued anywhere for very long - is to have a classless society. This is what made the Manifesto so revolutionary, he wanted to propose a very different way of going about doing things for society.
Part of my challenge is that Marx seems to be discussing granular externalities, e.g. classes. These are conceptual handles for swaths of people. Yet people remain individuals, from birth to death. Thus, societal alteration would seem to require some kind of internal renewal, not just a fresh set of labels. There's something of a top-down "Rousseau" flavor to Marx's ideas.
I wouldn't say he's trying to make them into "villains", he is trying rather to show what happens when one class of people has unchecked dominance over another and the dominated class has close to no opportunity to change it on their own. This may, again, be human nature - but that is what made the idea of communism so revolutionary as it hadn't been done before (and arguably still hasn't been done).
Again, I'm sort of rolling with "one class of people has unchecked dominance over another and the dominated class has close to no opportunity to change it on their own". One has to suspend disbelief, and allow Marx his say.
". .
I just don't grasp how any empirically valid model of secular human behavior can ever deliver on "arguably still hasn't been done". Ain't got that kind of faith, boss.
I've got opinions too. Like that your opinions about people sharing their opinions are dull.
You're saying what we're all thinking when we read your opinions.
The hardest part of climbing the ladder of success is getting through the crowd at the bottom.