Karl Marx (1818-1883) offers a wealth of material. There are those who follow him almost to the letter, as well as those who draw inspiration from his thought in a broader sense. During the early years of my university studies in the 1970s, I studied Marx in his fundamental texts as well as those of his European and Latin American interpreters. The apodictic rigidity he claimed for himself, presenting himself as a science that had discovered the inexorable laws of history and economics, felt stifling to me, so I soon turned my attention to his critics in the fields of philosophy, economics, history, and sociology.

In the seventies, I became familiar with Soviet Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong’s perspective on China’s Cultural Revolution, the Albanian proposal, Gramsci’s Latin Eurocommunism, European intellectual revisionism, May ’68 (with its intellectuals both for and against), and versions of liberation theology. However, the matter didn’t remain merely an intellectual discussion. Amidst this jumble of perspectives lay the social problem of poverty and inequality, a breeding ground for the Shining Path terrorism in my country (Peru), with its own intellectuals and agitators, a tragedy whose tragedy we continue to mourn.

Marx’s economics doesn’t lead to real-world economics. The history of the last two centuries hasn’t followed the dialectical movement he described. The prophesied paradise of a classless society never arrived; the millions of deaths left following real-world communism demonstrate that the individual is not an absolute in the Marxist worldview but merely a disposable element. In this respect, Bernstein’s (1850-1932) position was more balanced. In his critique of Marx, he opted for evolution instead of revolution, giving rise to social democracy, the heart of the European welfare state. I never found the so-called “scientific Marxism-Leninism” of my university days to be particularly compelling, much less the idea of ​​class struggle as the midwife of history.

In this part of the 21st century, cultural currents with a strong ideological charge have emerged, such as gender perspective, woke culture, identity politics, critical justice theory, intersectionality, decolonization, and so on. Are they the new face of Marxism? Not so much as a package deal, in my opinion. Marx’s economic framework, with its labor theory of value, surplus value, and the ever-increasing accumulation of capital, can hardly be applied to these ideologies. And what about Marx’s theory of alienation? Yes, one can speak of Marxist inspiration in this respect, but this influence is forced and contrived.

I would say, rather, that these ideologies are all dancing to their own tune. There are Marxist undertones in the style of the battle of the sexes, machismo, patriarchy, peoples dominated by capitalist imperialism, Gramscian communism in culture, and many other similar traits. However, all these ingredients are merely accessories that fail to capture the essential core of Marx’s early writings or his work in Capital. What are these crucial aspects of Marx’s thought? To find out, it will be very helpful to read a recent book by Professor José Rodríguez Iturbe, *Marx: An Approach* (Rialp, 2025). The author provides a rigorous and clear overview of Marx’s intellectual and personal journey, placing it within the historical context of his time, as well as the debates he held with other socialist authors of the era. The peculiarity of Marx’s thought, as well as its shortcomings, is brought to light.

Marx developed his rationalist design and subjected human and social reality to this model. The result was the diminishment of the individual and the distortion of reality. As Rodríguez Iturbe aptly points out, “the modern or postmodern perspective cannot understand the Judeo-Christian vision of historical events sub specie aeternitatis [under the concept of eternity], insofar as it judges history sub specie humanitatis [under the concept of humanity]… The Christian vision of history is radically different from the pre-Christian pagan vision and from the endeavor of post-Christian neo-paganism, within which it is legitimate to place Marxism. A Christian perspective cannot be limited to the absolute horizontalism of the approaches of modernity and postmodernity (p. 122).”

Human beings are dust, matter, certainly, but dust into which God has breathed spirit, making us in His image and likeness, a dimension to which Marx did not have access.