But the impression this mere tourist gets from the timeline of Marx’s thought is that he begins his intellectual career in what was the … how shall I say this … “avant-garde mainstream” (!?) of the late 1830’s / early 1840’s. Also, the guy loves italics.

Communist Manifesto (1848 – obviously inspired by recent events, and Marx was 30 – which is in the ideal “arena age” range, balancing both maturity and passion) was later, and Das Kapital (1867-1894) was much later. Marx had also been an American Civil War correspondent / commentator, and I would imagine that experience had some influence on him as well.

You get the occasional internet-ignoramus talk about Marx as part of “The Judeo-Bolshevist Conspiracy!”, but Marx was baptized and raised (classical) Liberal Lutheran” (to which his father converted prior to Marx’s birth). His early writing is basically clever “Naive Utopian Optimistic Enlightenment Protestant Social Justice” in the context of Prussian (gentle) absolutism. What he is particularly good at is getting slightly ahead of his contemporaries and remarking on how they are failing to realize / live-up-to the implications of their principles. He wasn’t an “extremist”, but something more like a “purist” (Puritan?), who was genuinely trying to understand what sincere fidelity to their shared principles meant.

One’s social context and inherited intellectual tradition creates a kind of mental inertia that prevented a lot of his contemporaries from understanding the full range of subconscious social assumptions under which they were operating and taking for granted. Marx was very successful in pointing this out to them and persuading them to move another step along the path – in terms of understanding that the implications of their principles required more socially radical reforms than they had originally anticipated – and then endorsing them, “I see, yes, I underestimated that … well … so be it!”

Marx himself probably did not appreciate where those principles would eventually lead him, but, early on, he played the role of the teeth in the leftward ratchet, being moved by his own moving.

In this way, Marx was really the Calvin of his age (except that the recognition of his contribution was mostly posthumous). “If we’re going to take God’s omnipotence and omnicompetence seriously, then that implied predestination, and that implies … Institutes of the Christian Church”. A lot of people who thought they were already taking those notions seriously realized they hadn’t been, and then had an important, radical choice to make. Marx did similarly, and note that this fits nicely into Moldbug’s theory of the History of leftist thought. When your priors and axioms have no internal, self-limiting principle, then it’s only a matter of social resistance and speed and technological details, and not, really the direction or eventual destination of the ‘left singularity’.

But perhaps the context shows that he was crudely expressing the same type sentiment that laid forth in his Critique of the Gotha Program: go big or go home.