Not Dogma but a Living Method: What Does Marx Mean for Us?

Dear friends,

This sudden "That's enough from me, I won't go on" exit in the group, and the arguments that followed, point to a sociological and psychological reality far deeper than a philosophical debate hitting a dead end. As a Marxist philosopher, I would like to begin by looking at the matter through the lens of epistemological and class analysis — exactly my field of interest.

These kinds of ad hominem attacks and cut-and-run reflexes are, in fact, a typical defence mechanism of subjects who struggle to find their bearings in the face of the pace of structural transformation in today's world, caught between the status quo and revolutionary change. When Lenin, in Materialism and Empirio-criticism, worked through the relativist and cynical approaches of his era, he put his finger on precisely this point: confronting a structural claim that would change the system root and branch requires from a person an immense courage to settle accounts with oneself. A mind that struggles to confront its own comfort zone, its social position, or the sense of helplessness brought by the age tends, in order to lighten this heavy intellectual burden, to turn the theoretical into tabloid fodder. Those who cannot produce a structural argument that would surpass Marx's theory at the conceptual level take refuge in his biography in an attempt to free themselves from historical and political responsibility. This is not a philosophical stance; it is a methodological escape route.

Let us set these artificial shelters aside and put those so-called "realistic" criticisms on the table, passing them through the famous Marxist method's filter of "the ruthless criticism of everything that exists":

A Mortal Who Was No "Saint": Marx with His Flaws and Tragedy

The greatest impasse of bourgeois ideology and of rational minds under its influence is to squeeze historical figures into the binary of either absolute "saint/prophet" or "monster/incompetent." Because liberal individualism, unable to grasp the social at a structural level, is obliged to read everything through personal morality and private success stories. We dialectical materialists, by contrast, do not need flawless, sterile heroes to build our theory. Before us stands a mortal of the nineteenth century who lived with all his contradictions, his weaknesses, and his immense tragedy.

Yes — it is a historical fact that Marx showed no rational success in keeping his household afloat, that he made decisions in everyday financial matters that could be called short-sighted, and that his home was seized for debt. While living as a stateless, penniless migrant in the muddy, cholera-scented slums of Soho in London, he buried his children Guido, Franziska, and his son Edgar, nicknamed "Musch," in the ground because of misery, cold, and inadequate nutrition.

At precisely this point bourgeois reason enters with its two-faced logic: when a worker's child dies of poverty in nineteenth-century London, shallow liberalism calls this "an objective fact of the system"; when Marx's child dies, it declares this "Marx's personal irresponsibility." Yet what was lived was the objective, physical destruction of the savage early period of capitalism upon Marx's own nuclear family. When Marx wrote in Capital about the limits of the working day, the exploitation of child labour, and the misery of the proletariat, he was not doing so from the comfort of an ivory-tower academic; he was putting those lines to paper while his children's coffins stood in the parlour. His tragedy is to have been crushed by the very gears of the system he criticised.

Let us turn to his relationship with Engels and the charge of material dependence that is so often bandied about... It is true that without the money coming from Friedrich Engels's textile factory in Manchester, Marx would never have finished Capital. But to read this relationship through the narrow "debit-credit" logic of bourgeois account books is philosophical blindness.

One of history's most magnificent dialectical ironies lies here: The theory that wrote capitalism's death warrant was financed by the profit of a capitalist factory. Engels bound himself for years to that trading office he despised so that his comrade Marx could complete those immense theoretical discoveries. This is not a patron-client relationship; it is the most refined, most tragic, and most founding revolutionary solidarity and partnership in praxis that human history has seen. Had Engels not shouldered that responsibility, humanity today would be deprived of that magnificent conceptual toolkit that took capitalism's X-ray.

The great genius of Soviet philosophical futurism and dialectical epistemology, Evald Ilyenkov, reminds us in Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete that the validity of a concept is independent of the psychological or biographical comfort of the subject who produced it. Marx is not a moral preacher, a "angel of goodness," or a life coach. We do not read Marx because he was a flawless head of household; we read him because he offered us an unshakeable epistemological method that explains the laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production, alienation, and commodity fetishism.

Just as Isaac Newton's difficult temperament in his personal life does not invalidate the Law of Gravitation, neither do Marx's promissory notes and human tragedies invalidate the theory of surplus value. Those who attack Marx the person are dynamics that have lost their philosophical bearings, consoling themselves by dealing only with the superficial dimensions of the matter because they cannot decipher the structural logic of the theoretical fortress he built.

The Myth of "No Field Experience" and Marx at the Barricade

One of the most comfortable approaches of bourgeois academia and the status quo is to portray Marx as an "ivory-tower intellectual" imprisoned in the dim corridors of the London Library, insulated from the world. This approach is not only a historical error; it is also the structural blindness of bourgeois epistemology, which cannot grasp the dialectical unity of thought and action — that is, of theory and praxis. Lenin, in What Is to Be Done? and On Revolutionary Theory, demolishes precisely this myth: in Marxist theory of knowledge, "knowing" is not observing in a laboratory; it is grasping the object from within the practice of changing it.

Marx was an organic revolutionary who stood at the very centre of the barricade, exile, clandestine organisation, and international class war, blending his theory with action.

The Communist Manifesto (1848): An Organisational Document Amid the Barricades

The Communist Manifesto is not an academic article. Written at the direct request of the Communist League that was shaking Europe at the time, it is a living organisational charter and action programme for the practical political needs of the working class. In 1848, when Marx wrote the Manifesto, he was not merely a writer but the logistical centre of a hot revolution:

• Material Support for Armed Struggle: When the wave of revolution rose in Belgium in 1848, Marx spent a very substantial portion of the inheritance left by his father to arm Brussels workers. For this he was arrested by the Belgian government on the charge of "inciting workers to armed insurrection" and deported.
• Journalism on the Battlefield: When he moved to Germany, he founded the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne, the heart of the revolution. This newspaper was not a rational news bulletin but a revolutionary headquarters giving daily tactics to barricade fighters. Marx was tried before the Prussian state's military courts; when the newspaper was shut down, he printed the final issue entirely in red ink as a last call to resistance for the workers and was sent into exile in the shadow of gun barrels.

The International Working Men's Association (First International): Multinational Organising

Marx's practical experience spread across an international and arduous geography that no trade-union bureaucrat or party leader of today could reach. Founded in 1864, he was not only the theoretician of the First International (IWMA) but its author of statutes, general secretary, and de facto executive. Marx wove the workers' movements across Europe thread by thread:

• Strike Funds and Cross-Border Solidarity: When English textile workers went on strike, employers tried to bring in cheap "strike-breaking" workers from France and Belgium. Marx used the International network to organise trade unions in France and Belgium, blocked cross-border worker movement, and collapsed the capitalists' move in the field.
• Faction Wars: Marx confronted Proudhonist reformists, Lassallean nationalist workers, and Bakunin's anarchist cells face to face, congress after congress, hall after hall. He defended his ideas not in an ivory tower but in the bustling halls of the London, Geneva, and The Hague congresses, clashing them with the workers' direct will.

The Paris Commune (1871): The Manifesto Refuted in the Field and Reborn

The Paris Commune is the most magnificent scene of that immense dialectical bridge between Marx's desk-bound theory and street-level practice. When Parisian workers stormed the heavens in 1871 and established history's first workers' state, Marx was not a distant observer. Lenin unpacks this connection brilliantly in The State and Revolution: the Commune is the moment Marx put his theory into the laboratory.

• The Only Correction to the Manifesto: Marx and Engels made only one official correction to the 1848 Manifesto in their lifetimes. That correction was distilled from the street experience of the Paris Commune. After the Commune barricades, Marx said: "The Commune proved that the working class cannot simply take over the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes; it must smash it."
• From the Street to Theory: Marx discussed the points where the Commune was stuck in real time through secret courier networks he maintained with the communards in Paris. When the Commune was slaughtered, while the blood on the barricades had not yet dried, he wrote The Civil War in France, immortalising the Commune's practice in the streets.

To call Marx detached from practice is the result of a methodological deficiency that erases the history of revolution, the barricades, the exiles, and the International congresses. Marx is Marx because he took philosophy out of aristocrats' salons and carried it to the sooty walls of factories and behind the barricades. When he wrote that famous sentence in the 11th Thesis — "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it" — he was not shouting it to earn an academic title but as the first condition of that great social transformation, praxis, to which he devoted his life.

Beyond Dogmas: Why Marx and Engels Still, in the World of 2026?

Our interlocutor's cut-and-run — "Those who set out with their motto fell into the trap of social fascism" — and his attempt to bill today's dark, reactionary period to socialism is less a matter of intellectual depth than a structural epistemological surrender.

Lenin, in the great retreat and reaction after the defeat of the 1905 revolution (Stolypin reaction), when analysing petty-bourgeois intellectuals who lost their philosophical bearings and drifted into mysticism, Machism, and cynicism, exposed precisely this mentality. Whenever the historical river withdraws slightly in its bed, the intellectually rootless intellectual panics at once and joins a shallow liberal chorus: "Look, we tried and negative results followed; therefore the fault lies in the method itself." This mentality is a tragic illusion, limited and paralysed by the ideological apparatuses of the ruling class, that loads the blame for collapse onto the theory of liberation.

The Sin of First Experiments and Diagnosing Deviations on the Turkish Left

To equate the scientific core of a method with its bureaucratic deformations or childhood diseases in historical practice is a philosophical and methodological error. Just as the barracks-style schematism of the Soviet experiment is not Marx's fault, the structural deviations in transformation processes in Turkey are not a methodological error of Marxism either.

Let us be blunt and speak plainly: the history of the Turkish left is afflicted with deviations that abandoned the lifeblood of the Marxist method — the principle of "concrete analysis of the concrete situation":

• On one side, dogmatic schematism that fails to see the distinctive historical development of Turkish society and forcibly presses translated templates from Soviet or Chinese handbooks onto this soil,
• On the other, reformist deviations that entirely lose the class axis and hitch themselves to nationalist reflexes, or take refuge in the comfortable harbours of civil-society-ism (NGO-isation) and identity politics with the wind of the neoliberal era at their backs...

Those who attack Marxism today through these historical caricatures are in fact fleeing from settling accounts with the inadequacy of their own past practice. If we do not cancel the laws of aerodynamics because the first aeroplane crashed, neither can you condemn a universal social science for the bureaucratic, chauvinist, or schematic errors made in humanity's first revolutionary laboratories. Those errors are not the bankruptcy of Marxism; on the contrary, they are the historical evidence of the deviations that dialectical method warns against.

The Class Has No Other Choice: We Will Try Again!

In the savage reactionary climate of the world of 2026, amid insecurity, war drums, and algorithmic slavery, the working class has two options: either remain under capitalism's rotting corpse and surrender to barbarism, or try the historical march again.

The class has no luxury of saying "That's enough from me, I'm not playing"; for it, this debate is not an intellectual hobby but a question of survival. If we reconstruct Samuel Beckett's famous line with dialectical materialism: Try again, fail again, fail better — until historical necessity turns into the leap of freedom.

The class will step onto the stage again as a rational force, rising from the ashes of those first experiments, clearing away its own bureaucratic sediment, turning the errors of the past into theoretical ammunition. For dialectics teaches us that where there is oppression, resistance is an objective law.

The Naturalness of Referring to Marx in the World Marx Defined

Referring to Marx today is not a matter of "faith" or "nostalgia." If:

• The working class still works from morning till night with tools it did not produce and enriches its boss at the end of the day (exploitation of surplus value),
• Dispossessed masses are alienated from their own humanity everywhere from office towers to courier networks (alienation),
• Capital, as Marx formulated it, is concentrated in the hands of a few global monopolies and turns states into playthings (concentration of capital),

what could be more natural than referring to Marx to understand the world? Just as it is as natural to turn to Newton and Einstein every second that gravity exists, in this world where class conditions unfold as Marx mapped them, choosing Marx as a guide is equally objective and natural.

Not the Darkness of Dogma, but the Purity of Science and Philosophy

What those who bring the matter to the shallowness of "That's enough from me" and leave the philosophical field truly miss is the immense scientific and philosophical clarity at the roots of Marxist epistemology. They imagine Marxism to be a "secular religion" with rules fixed in advance, or a dogmatic bundle of beliefs not to be questioned. Yet dialectical materialism is not a church catechism; it is the most refined peak that rational reasoning, scientific methodology, and the classical philosophical heritage have reached.

Lenin, in Materialism and Empirio-criticism, defines the greatest danger of periods of philosophical regression as fideism (faith-ism). Dominant ideology, in order to cloud the consciousness of the class, tries to destroy the idea of objective truth; in its place it puts either blind dogma or a relativist cynicism that says "nothing can be known, everything is mere perception." Those who try to smear the method today by brandishing the bureaucratic deviations of socialism's first historical laboratories have fallen precisely into this trap of relativism. They behave like a medieval alchemist who denies chemistry because the test tube exploded in his hands.

Ilyenkov's Legacy: "Ideological Memorisation" vs. "Living Thought"

That genius figure of Soviet philosophy, Evald Ilyenkov, devoted his life to fighting precisely this dogmatism. In Dialectical Logic, Ilyenkov philosophically targets the structural mechanisms that turn Marxism into a frozen pile of formulas. For him, dialectics is not a template imposed on society from outside; it is the logic of motion of objective reality itself.

"Dialectics is not a list of rules to be memorised. It is the mental reproduction of the concrete. If reality changes, dialectical reason must follow that change and reinforce its concepts anew. The right path is not the comfortable darkness of dogma but the arduous and luminous trail of science." — Evald Ilyenkov

Let us recall Spinoza's magnificent philosophical maxim: Veritas se ipsam cognoscit et falsum (Light shows both itself and darkness; truth is the criterion of both itself and falsehood). The purity of Marxism is nourished from precisely this Spinozist and Hegelian rational vein. We do not call something "true" because Marx wrote it; it is true because it finds rational and scientific correspondence in objective reality.

The Purity of the Class: Common Interests, Common Guide

So where does this philosophical clarity sit in our present practice? Here is the founding point of connection where we determine our guide in line with our class interests.

The "purity" we seek in the ranks of our class is not moralistic sterilisation or dogmatic bigotry. Our purity is intellectual clarity, methodological sharpness, and unshakeable commitment to the historical interests of the class. It is the defence of the working class's rational, organised, and scientific stance against the indecisive, cynical, and fragmented approaches of intellectual circles detached from practice.

The sole condition for us to walk together in the ranks of the class is to meet in this scientific clarity. For the ruling class uses identities, dogmas, mysticism, and the psychology of past defeat to divide us. Our only weapon to break through this encirclement is: scientific rationalism, the dialectical method, and organised class solidarity.

Final Word: Walking Toward the Future

We do not pin Marx and Engels to our chests like totems and perform nostalgia rituals. We continue to walk trusting the luminous, objective, and rational path that science and philosophy show us. We have put the errors of the first experiments in our pocket as laboratory data; we have closed our doors to the winds of dogma and to the submissive rot of liberal cynicism.

Unlike those who leave the stage saying "That's enough from me," our reckoning with this world of exploitation is not over. Our guide is clear, our ranks are pure, our lantern is science.

Shoulder to shoulder, we will keep walking in the spotless light of science and philosophy!