There are certain things I understand about marxism and the marxist approach, but there are other parts that make no sense to me.
Marxists believe in dialectical materialsm, that societies evolve through competing paradigms of how resources are best produced and distributed. It is dialectical because it involves a theory of change, and materialistic because it believes that these things are driven by objective limits placed on scarce resources. Marxism also believes that social belief systems are based on material structures, that society invents and uses ideology to prop up these material systems.
I agree with all of that. I take it for granted, and most modern readers probably take it for granted, as well. These are revolutionary ideas, but ones that are now so integral to basic social science, that most educated people would believe them without thinking. There is a lot of extraneous material tied up in this basic analysis: Karl Marx and Frederich Engels were in their 20s, intoxicated with Hegelianism, and honestly that 1840s Germany was the perfect exemplar of all human societies. The amount that they ascribed the social classes of 19th century Europe as being objective, universal entities looks silly as we have a wider exposure to theories of class, race, ethnicity, gender, language, and the like. And their idea that they had discovered the end point of the dialectic also seems premature. They somehow missed guessing that capitalism and communism might themselves have a dialectic and a fusion system, which is what we are mostly living in now: state-moderated capitalism.
Societies proceed through development ways to use material resources, which leads to conflict, and resolution, and then societies invent stories to explain these material structures. Check. In broad strokes, this makes sense.
What I don't understand is how people who believe this, who believe this is an objective way to conduct social science, then spin into a story of heroes and villains that would make a scripter for a Saturday Morning Cartoon show say "This needs some nuance". I know that not all marxists believe this, but at least online, and even in the left wing media, the entire process of our economic system is described, without irony, as "Billionaires want to buy more yachts!". Historically, communists needed to motivate people with low levels of literacy, so using this type of shorthand made a lot of sense. And even now, perhaps its what a good propagandist does: just tell the most emotionally satisfying story. But it is troublesome to me that it is believed so broadly. Because I believe that the world that we live in today is a product of society optimizing the production and distribution of resources as well as it can, given the technology and social structures it has at the moment. I believe that when someone jumps in their F-150 and drives 10 miles to Walmart for a box of waffles, its not because a group of Gargamelish billionaires have programmed them to do that so they can afford another yacht: they are doing that because an evolutionary process has led to this point. And like all evolutionary processes, it is bringing about change.
So by following and believing the basic logical idea of Marxism, I manage to be completely cut-off from the emotional side of Marxism, at least as I usually see it expressed.