ABSTRACT
Marxism, a criticism of nascent capitalism, has long established itself as the hegemonic alternative system of thought in revolutionary movements. Certain theoretical weaknesses of the Marxist system, its quick evolution into ideology, even into religion for the Orthodox Marxist movement, transformed the utopian project of Marxist communism into a true 20th century dystopia and marginalised Karl Marx’s thought as rational thought and political project. Understanding Marx’s thought trajectory, his theoretical and practical weaknesses as well as his strengths are far from being useless scientific work. Marx’s approach was actually aiming at criticising the liberal ideology behind the work of those who claimed to follow a purely empirical and descriptive scientific method without questioning the implicit assumptions of their science. Ethics is Marx’s poor relation, to the point of having even had to develop the notion of a “proletarian morality” to justify his key thesis of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a method of transforming societies.
