The Marxist critique is Elitist

 

Just as capitalists or the Oligarchy and those in its pay-tow don't have an excuse for the economic insecurity of the masses, it doesn't automatically infer that Marx was right (as Eagleton puts it).  The fact is, Marxism is accepted and believed by people who cannot explain it or understand it*.
Whereas, the same is true, for example, of Catholicism but nobody is going to argue in dissertation after dissertation that it is a basis for an economy.  

Marxism is opposed to the very thing that it is aping (religion).It has the scintillating seduction of intellectual elitism all over it.  
Its discourse lies entirely in intellectual abstraction promulgating further intellectual abstraction (never simplifying, but always re-negotiating itself as more and more complex).  Grasping its thesis is an out-of-reach mystique.  Its an abomination of Calvinist theologising mixed with Rousseaun.
It is pervaded by an air of arch-scholasticism, generating for itself a qabbalah of impenetrability enabling it to perpetuate its discourse and the professorial-clerical class
with it.  No one really understands the intentional byzantinism of Das Kapital et al, so more professors and dissertations are needed.

Marx himself exudes the spirit of the degenerate bourgeoisie class (who he claimed to despise in favor of the proletariat).  Unless you take the reading that the dictatorship 
of the proles as the consequence of industrial capitalism and that, only post-prole, would 
the utopia of classlessness be achieved.  Then Marx would not be the degenerate 
bourgeoisie, but he would be anti-prole.  So it goes, back and forth in a circular argument.

If you take a solidly materialist view of humanity i.e. the Darwinian one, without the 
crutch-of-God view, of humans as mammals hence social creatures, then hierarchy 
is still the evident state of our our socialism, our being, societies, ordered or disordered.

 
*Their excuse being that "do not" is not the same as "cannot", i.e. they believe they will, one day.  Perhaps then utopia will be had.

tags: Ralph Milliband.