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Notes -
Their counterargument is: Marx was a fallible man who was susceptible to the biases and perceptual limitations of his time and place. He lived in Germany in the gnarliest part of the Industrial Revolution, so of course the relationship between workers and factory owners seemed like the most important conflict in the world to him. He was surrounded by it every day! However, at the exact same time as Marx was writing, millions of people were literally enslaved in the New World (and in many part of the Old), and women were in a sort of bondage that Marx, being a man of his time, just couldn’t bring himself to grapple with. We, with the benefit of two hundred extra years of learning and dialogue and hearing other perspectives, can now clearly recognize the limitations in Marx’s framework, while still recognizing that his key insights - his analytical approach, his relentless and sincere belief in justice and the shattering of unjust hierarchies, his keen observation of the dialectical nature of power relations, his recognition of historical progress as a result of the resolution of societal contradictions - are centrally valuable to the achievement of our goals even today.
If Marxism has an advantage over Christianity, it’s that Marxists have no obligation to treat any particular thing Marx said as some sacred final word on the subject. Marx was just a man, and other men have been able to take the things he said that are useful, and discard or correct (or, in a Hegelian sense, sublate) the things that were shortsighted. I understand what you mean about there being a sort of Ship of Theseus problem, but Marxism has long been a sort of extended branching dialogue between academics, juxtaposed against but learning from, real-world concrete praxis by committed activists. It’s a sort of evolving religion - which is appropriate, given its roots in Hermeticism and Gnosticism, which believe that humanity is slowing rebuilding God by progressively discovering His nature and becoming more like him over time.
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