Karl Marx, a “philosopher recluse” sustained by Engels’ handouts, sketched a utopian blueprint for human liberation in his smoke-filled study.He cast history as a saga of class struggle, envisioning a future of stateless, oppression-free abundance—a “communist paradise.” Yet, he overlooked a fundamental truth: utopias cannot be built upon human nature; they can only ensnare it.
As Karl Popper sharply criticized, Marx’s so-called “scientific socialism” was never truly scientific. It was a prophetic doctrine cloaked in pseudo-scientific jargon — a blend of Hegelian dialectics, economic determinism, and historical inevitability. The result? A theory that could explain everything and predict nothing. A system immune to falsification, endlessly self-justifying. Every failure was merely “premature”; every criticism, a bourgeois illusion.
And so, what began as a dream of emancipation turned into a machinery of domination. Not just Marx, but generations of people were suffocated by this grand narrative — a theory that promised heaven but delivered new shackles.
Enter Vladimir Putin — or as I prefer, the “Fat Hog of Neo-Czarism” — not a philosopher, but a linguistic illusionist of the digital age. Unlike Marx, he isn’t dreaming of the future. He’s rebranding the past. With terms like “sovereign democracy,” “civilizational conflict,” and “traditional values,” he’s bedazzling the masses while dragging them back into the mire of imperial nostalgia. Strip away the polished vocabulary, and you’ll find the same old sewage of authoritarian thought fermenting beneath.
Where Marx dreamed of revolution liberating mankind, Putin engineered a reality where war justifies control, paranoia legitimizes power, and enemies — real or imagined — fuel the machinery of state terror. One was a misled prophet; the other, a manipulative strongman. But both are nodes on the same historical disaster chain — a pattern where disillusioned men use grand illusions to reshape the world in their own fractured image.
We must recognize a dangerous archetype here: the failed man turned visionary, the rejected turned redeemer. With resentment as fuel and ideology as weapon, he paints his personal wounds as collective destiny. He drafts utopian scripts that, when played out on the real-world stage, lead not to harmony, but to horror.
These men are not “creating history.” They are staging its endless repetition — a loop of disillusionment, coercion, and suffering. In their narratives, the people are always tools, the future is always a justification, and power is the only true faith .