The State and Revolution was the big turning point for me as well because it dismantles all the arguments regarding reformism. And what really struck me about it was how relevant it felt because you see these exact same debates playing out today. And tha made me realize that Lenin hit on an invariant in the system. After a whole century of capitalism, we’re still at the exact same place.
What I find interesting about Marxism is that it inoculates you from capitalist propaganda. Once you understand a certain amount of theory, then the whole system is laid bare, and you can see exactly what’s happening and why it’s happening. You start realizing how elections work, why ‘progressive’ candidates never win. Why supposedly left parties always betray their promises. All of a sudden, it’s not just random bad luck, or people not voting hard enough, you start seeing it through a structural lens, and these become necessary outcomes which are the only ones possible within the system. And I think that’s the real power of dialectical materialism, it creates a level of understanding that makes you immune to the sophistry that the propagandists use.
Exactly, being able to see the root causes and then trace how they connect to the symptoms we observe is at the crux of actually understanding what’s going on.