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I think it’s Kwame Ture who said something like Marx didn’t invent dialectical materialism he discovered it/described it, just like Newton didn’t invent gravity.
Marx also thought that he was a discoverer, not inventor of his ideas:
And now as to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists, the economic anatomy of classes. What I did that was new was to prove: (1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with the particular, historical phases in the development of production, (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.
I’ve been following a TikToker who’s well read and is constantly arguing this. His position essentially boils down to race being the primary contradiction, not class. And his anti-Marx stance seems to boil down to the need to de-center white thinkers and that the adoption of Marx doesn’t by revolutionaries of color doesn’t inherently make Marxism an anticolonial ideology. It’s hard to have high quality discussion with him unfortunately because white leftists are constantly making asses of themselves in his lives.
This is a complex topic, but most marxists think that class and race aren’t extricable, but intertwined, and to try to separate them into this situation is “class struggle” and this one is “race struggle” is a false premise.
