ABSTRACT
Marxism at its best is a way of critically analyzing society to support a liberatory vision of a better world. In a centralized system one aspect of social life is the fundamental cause of everything else, but the other nodes of social life do not interact with each other nor do they significantly influence the fundamental cause. This is similar to the crudest forms of traditional and official Marxism. When using the notion of overdetermination to understand social causality, each site in society is seen to develop differently because of its complex constitution by all other sites. Social development will thus likely be uneven rather than linear, uniform, and progressive, as in traditional Marxism. The socialist imaginary in supposedly scientific Marxism was utopian in that any problems in socialist societies were attributed to them being not socialist enough. In other words, when socialism fully arrived it would eradicate poverty, end racism and sexism, stop environmental degradation and entertain visiting relatives.
