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It's nothing against Marx or Marxism, I'm kind of done putting intellectuals on pedestals like that. It feels like a status game where some people get elevated to "heroic geniuses" and you're a pleb for not appreciating them, while others get buried and you're a kook for even knowing they exist. Just talk about their ideas, if they're so great.
There's an argument I saw once that suggested we already do this.
It would be ridiculous to study from a Calculus book written by Newton or Leibniz, wouldn't it? Because their ideas really were so great, many people afterward have successfully understood them and extended them and found better ways to teach them, and because their ideas really were so great there's not much conflict between modern Calc 1 Textbook A and modern Calc 1 Textbook B; everybody agrees that you'll learn the important stuff either way, so we just quibble a bit over how easily or how well. Ask how to learn Calculus and you might get a recommendation from 1970 but you won't get one from 1700.
Shouldn't this have happened with Marx? Maybe the ideas should now have a more solid theoretical basis, or a more rationally organized terminology, or something, but they should be basically the same ideas repackaged in newer and better forms in a way so complete that the original becomes a historical text, completely obsoleted as an educational text. That's how things like science and math work.
But that's not how Marxism works. I think it's related to the problem where, when a bunch of Marxists try to implement Marxism, there seems to be an astonishingly high risk of some of them ending up with an ice axe to the brain. Even when the lucky ones get to claim that they've refined it into "Leninism" or "Stalinism" or whatever, they at least end up getting denounced by their successors posthumously. Perhaps Marx's genius was so heroic that he just got everything right the first time and nobody could improve upon it? But more likely he's just a Schelling point. He inspired some major far-left revolutions, so if you want to be a far-left revolutionary the obvious thing to do is to coordinate around him, but you have to rally around him, not his ideas, because there's just not enough substance in the ideas to latch on to. Everybody sees the objective truths in two random Calculus textbooks and agrees they're both still Calculus, but try to rally around two random analyses of Marx and there's too much risk you'll just get two warring groups each convinced that the other group aren't True Marxists.
I'd like to point out that your example is misleading. Math has advanced over time, and all inhuman things advance over time. But all human things simply do not. This is why the Tao Te Ching and Meditations by Marcus Aurelius still hold up today. Most wisdom does not seem to advance over time.
Some truths are universal. "For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away". This is still true today. Feedback loops makes it easier to get more the more of something you have. If you are intelligent enough, you can see truths like this, even if they won't be named or made into concrete concepts for another 500 years.
Now, I haven't read Marx, and while I don't know if his ideas were wrong, I think he was wrong as a person. His work is a reflection of who he is, and the attempt to legitimize his own values and ideals. But even if his theory is largely correct, one cannot prove values. There's one more factor which complicates matters further, it's that at the high ends of intelligence, a slight difference in beliefs can lead to vastly different conclusions. Jordan Peterson, Nietzsche, and Jung agreed on a lot of things, but their takes on religion and human life are very different.
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This is certainly a valid point, and there's a real phenomenon there that needs to be investigated. However, Marx is a particularly poor example to illustrate @ArjinFerman's original point ("Just talk about their ideas, if they're so great"), because people do in fact talk about his ideas, much more often than they read his original texts. Phrases like "class struggle", "proletarian revolution", and "capitalism in crisis" are deployed frequently without specific reference to Marx's name or one of his texts. There have been plenty of avowed socialists who never read Marx. So clearly his ideas have taken on a life of their own beyond the confines of his original writing.
As for why there's still continuing interest in Marx's original texts themselves: think of philosophy like a giant thread on TheMotte. When you pick up a book written by a contemporary Marxist philosopher, you're reading a big post full of quote replies that's 20 levels deep, and it's replying to a bunch of other people, who were ultimately replying to Marx's OP. When you're trying to get up to speed on a long conversation with lots of back-and-forth arguments, isn't it better to read the whole thing yourself so you have the full context in all its nuance, instead of relying on someone else's paraphrase? Because that's what we're dealing with here: it's a dialogue between people about politically fraught issues, rather than a mathematical or scientific treatise.
If you wanted to understand someone's views on, say, abortion, would you rather read a paraphrase of their views, or would you rather read their own explanation of their views in their own words? Philosophy intrinsically deals with issues where the definitions of the principal terms are vague and contentious, and attempts at paraphrase and simplification are prone to distortion by preexisting biases. You probably wouldn't want to rely on a committed pro-choice advocate to give a sympathetic gloss to a pro-life article, especially when you can just, you know, read what the pro-life person said in the first place. Even another pro-life advocate might introduce inaccuracies into a paraphrase that the first pro-life advocate might reject, because despite being on the same side, they might not share the exact same conception of central concepts like "life", "murder", and "personhood". The contentious nature of the issues makes it harder to substitute out the original texts.
I'd dispute that. Marx seems like the central example of an author you're supposed to have read (preferably in original German) and if you haven't, you're a pleb. Few people defend his ideas in themselves, and the first defence of them tends to be "you haven read enough theory".
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