How Marxists killed Marx
Karl Marx is like that great great great grandfather whose stories of societal stewardship over generations change to the extent that they no longer pertain to that person. Marx, arguably the most intelligent entity in social and political sciences, suffers from a misfortune quite frequent among people of his stature. Usually, their followers are the ones that bury their message. Marxists have done more damage to Marx than capitalists could ever imagine doing.
Marx became aware of the possible damage with the first fallout with the French Marxist socialism supporters during the Programme of Parti Ouvrier. A certain young naive (kind of a moron) activist, Jules Gesude, wrote to Marx, highlighting how he, along with his friends, had embodied Marxism in their workers' movement. Marx, while appreciating their Programme, was explicitly against their approach. Marx accused Gesude of "revolutionary phrase-mongering" and, more importantly, objected to activists' inability to understand the value of reformist struggles and pragmatic demands that can be met within unperverted capitalism. Marx denied the need for their revolution before an attempt at reform. On the fallout, he coined his famous quote - " [if they are Marxists, then] what is certain is that I myself am not a Marxist."
Whoring out a dead intelligent reformer as the poster boy for their revolution, in the subsequent years, Marxists got involved in everything from JFK's assassination to the fall of the USSR. Instead of spending time in the study rooms updating the ideas of Marxism, the scholars spent time defending them in the news editorials and taking shots at each other in the public eye. The astute science philosopher Karl Popper aptly pointed out that Marxism by the late 1900s was as valuable to science (even the social and political sciences) as astrology. Instead of listening to the scholars or the workers, the self-proclaimed intellectual activists got more entertained by their marches on the streets and the newspaper profiles. With each new generation, Marx's readership goes down and the blabber of his greatness in social circles goes up. Today's Marxists are historically most illiterate in Marxism. Recently, someone wrote an extended essay on how Marx had predicted the current income inequality crisis.
Marx, if alive, would have smelt the stink of this claim, and so did I. For one, Marx never predicted it as he couldn't have. The current structures of the global economy and the true nature of the inequality generated from it are complex enough to require calculating the Gini Coefficient (a measure of inequality) on a fat-tailed distribution. That's even befuddling for quite a lot of decent economists and statisticians, leaving aside Marxists. For another better reason, the essay was bullshit as this person ordered Marx's paperback work from Amazon to read it up in a 4-BHK bungalow under decent air conditioning while his maid cooked his meal. And that's how friends, Marxists killed Marx.