> Marx believed that making functioning plans was useless since progress was inevitable once unleashed.
Marx believed that planning out the detailed structure of a future utopian society, in the tradition of Owen or Fourier, was useless. And he was right. Societies are not and have never been the product of intentional design: no individual has the necessary power, no group has the necessary agency. They're the accretion, year after year, of millions of independent agents doing the best they can with the constraints the past has imposed on them. We can adjust the constraints, to some extent, and maybe aim, very imprecisely, at some desired end state, but we don't get to skip straight there.
Marx believed that planning out the detailed structure of a future utopian society, in the tradition of Owen or Fourier, was useless. And he was right. Societies are not and have never been the product of intentional design: no individual has the necessary power, no group has the necessary agency. They're the accretion, year after year, of millions of independent agents doing the best they can with the constraints the past has imposed on them. We can adjust the constraints, to some extent, and maybe aim, very imprecisely, at some desired end state, but we don't get to skip straight there.