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Notes -
This is a surprisingly complicated question, over which scholars reasonably differ. I do think most of Marx's own writings assert a kind of historical inevitability. He was also unquestionably an advocate for that change, but not to the point where he ever did any real revolution-organizing of his own. But it turns out he was just factually wrong on many questions of economics, and he certainly never formulated a practical approach to revolution.
This ties back to Marx's Hegelian roots. The disciples of Hegel fell into two distinct camps: conservative Hegelians who viewed the unfolding of history as inevitable, but also as collectively transcending any one person's insights or inputs. For them, attempting to "reform" the system was just interfering with processes which no human could reasonably comprehend (or, therefore, effectively guide). Whereas the radical Hegelians were basically accelerationists; they believed that the arc of history bent toward justice and that meant the faster history could be made to "progress" toward the predicted utopia, the better off everyone would be. Arguably Marx's problem with the radical Hegelians was that they weren't sufficiently radical. But stated a little differently, Hegel's focus on "spirit" Marx saw as ineffectual and disconnected from practical reality; he wanted more of a focus on the material origins of oppression.
This focus on oppression as the enemy is substantially what percolates through leftist political thought--to the point that even non-Marxist liberals will often talk about "oppression" as a major focus for political activism (though what actually constitutes oppression, as opposed to say inconvenience or violations of preference, turns out to be a difficult question for honest thinkers). Certainly any theorist styled "critical" is focused on the practical alleviation of perceived oppression. Today, I think most people who like Marx are also very interested in political activism rather than in the academic question of Socialism's putative inevitability. But I assume there are at least some academics out there who could be accurately characterized along such lines.
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