Giovanni Gentile, before earning his infamous title as the “Philosopher of Fascism,” utterly demolished Karl Marx’s philosophy in two monographs from 1897 and 1899, a mere 14 years after Marx’s death in 1883. These early works, untranslated into English until 2017, expose Gentile’s razor-sharp mastery of philosophy and the intellectual currents of his era. Sharing a Hegelian lineage — Gentile studied Hegel’s works under Donato Jaja at the University of Pisa in the 1890s — Gentile grasped Marx’s ideas with a penetrating clarity that A. James Gregor argued eclipsed most anti-Marxists and even many self-proclaimed Marxists. Remarkably, Lenin himself recommended Gentile’s The Philosophy of Marx as essential reading in Karl Marx A Brief Biographical Sketch With an Exposition of Marxism, despite their ideological chasm, praising its spotlight on overlooked facets of Marx’s materialist dialectics, such as the fraught interplay between consciousness and matter. Gentile’s prescience was eerie: Marx’s unpublished manuscripts, released by the Soviet Union between 1932 and 1939, vindicated his depiction of Marx as a muddled neo-Hegelian rather than a crude materialist, affirming the damning adage: “Marx was a bad Marxist.”

Gentile zeroed in on Marx’s historical materialism — later rebranded as dialectical materialism, a term Marx never uttered, coined by Joseph Dietzgen in 1887 and popularized by Engels in 1888. Merriam-Webster defines it as a theory positing that political and historical events arise from social conflicts fueled by material needs, resolved through dialectical contradictions. Engels portrayed it as an eternal cycle of moving matter, where life and consciousness are ephemeral illusions, and only matter’s inexorable laws persist:

"It is an eternal cycle in which matter moves, a cycle that certainly only completes its orbit in periods of time for which our terrestrial year is no adequate measure, a cycle in which the time of highest development, the time of organic life and still more that of the life of being conscious of nature and of themselves, is just as narrowly restricted as the space in which life and self-consciousness come into operation. A cycle in which every finite mode of existence of matter, whether it be sun or nebular vapour, single animal or genus of animals, chemical combination or dissociation, is equally transient, and wherein nothing is eternal but eternally changing, eternally moving matter and the laws according to which it moves and changes."

— Frederick Engels, Dialectics of Nature

Italian philosophers Antonio Labriola and Benedetto Croce sparred over whether historical materialism qualified as a genuine philosophy of history, akin to Hegel’s or Vico’s. Labriola affirmed it in his 1896 essays; Croce rejected it as crude economic determinism in a 1897 lecture, deeming it a mere heuristic for historians but utterly impotent for guiding socialism or foretelling the future. Gentile aligned with Labriola, contending that Marx — whose 1845–1846 drafts with Engels were saturated in Hegel’s dialectical method — envisioned history as a dialectical cascade of class contradictions and resolutions, rendering it a revolutionary blueprint for communists. Gentile observed that Marx never forged a formal ethical system like Kant’s categorical imperative or Aristotle’s virtue ethics, but instead subordinated morality to historical contingencies within historical materialism, with communism’s ethics anchored in class struggle as it hurtles toward its inexorable climax — Marx himself cast this as a moral imperative in 1848: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains”:

"Now what does it mean, towards historical materialism, as towards every philosophy of history, that morality is a fact? Fact means history; and history is what historical materialism must study and elucidate, not what it must produce; it is its content, its presupposition, not its product; and what is presupposed cannot be denied. [...] Thus conceived, historical materialism must account for itself and for the whole of life; and as in life there is the beautiful and the good and the ugly and the bad, it must explain the beautiful and the ugly, and the good and the bad, that is, it must assign them a legitimate place."

— Giovanni Gentile, The Philosophy of Marx

Yet Gentile’s apparent defense was a masterful trap — he argued that Marx’s materialism eviscerates his own system from within. Unlike Hegel’s absolute, which unfolds dialectically through history, Marx’s relativism cannot uphold a true philosophy of history; predictions about material events devolve into banal forecasting, devoid of metaphysical rigor. Hegel’s framework charts the evolution of immaterial spirit; Marx’s, shackled to matter, collapses into mere historiography, stripped of any philosophical profundity. Gentile branded this a “wretched deviation” from Hegelian thought, a verdict echoed by Italian philosopher Diego Fusaro, who insists that Marx harbored persistent idealistic elements despite his materialist pretensions.

Diego Fusaro on How Marx Was an Idealist

Gentile’s most lethal blow targeted Marx’s philosophy of praxis — prioritizing human activity over abstract theory—rooted in his 1845 Theses on Feuerbach, an 11-point manuscript unearthed by Engels in 1888, where Marx proclaimed that philosophers must transform the world, not merely interpret it. Influenced by Feuerbach, a Left Hegelian whose 1841 work molded Marx’s alienation theory by positing that religion projects human essence onto a divine phantom, Gentile discerned Marx’s rejection of Feuerbach’s vulgar materialism for its concealed idealism, pivoting instead to praxis as dynamic intervention. Gentile traced praxis back to Socrates’s dialectical method in Plato’s dialogues from 380 BCE, where knowledge arises through interrogation, but contended that Marx’s materialist perversion — binding reality to sensory activity rather than pure thought — dooms it to implosion. Marx’s praxis dialectically fuses subject and object, reshaping both, but his materialist metaphysics — swapping Hegel’s spirit for sensory data — self-destructs: if reality is purely sensory, matter exists independent of sense, eroding the very foundation. Philip Spratt amplified this fatal inconsistency, asserting that if consciousness is merely physiological under Marx’s materialism, its truths — including Marxism itself — become inherently unreliable, rendering the philosophy grotesquely self-contradictory:

"Dialectical materialism claims to have freed Hegel’s dialectic from the errors due to his idealism. But these doctrines—the sovereignty of thought, the dialectic as a superior mode of understanding, the identity of being and knowing, the emergence of truth from error, and knowledge and practice as a single process approaching truth asymptotically—are all plausible only in a context of idealistic monism. In a materialistic system there is no more reason why the human intellect should be sovereign than the dog’s or the ant’s intellect: dogs and ants are part of nature, too. The dialectic is an infallible guide only if it embodies the self-movement of the idea: otherwise it is just as likely to lead to error as to truth… [Marx’s] argument, that in materialism physiological processes determine thought, has been used by McTaggart to disprove materialism. These processes proceed according to the laws of physiology, not of logic, and accordingly are not likely to give truth. If, then, our ideas are physiological processes, those ideas will be unreliable, and in particular the doctrine of materialism will be unreliable. Hence, materialism is self-contradictory."

— Philip Spratt, Diamat as Philosophy of Nature

Gentile’s critique mirrors Spratt’s, underscoring how Marx’s materialist lens sabotages his praxis. Gentile’s later Actual Idealism, positing thought as the sole reality, resolves this impasse, whereas Marx’s incoherent fusion of idealism and materialism crumbles irreparably:

"In Marx, praxis is synonymous with human sensory activity… Reality … is a subjective production of man; a production, however, of sensory activity; not of thought, as Hegel and other idealists believed."

— Giovanni Gentile, The Philosophy of Marx

Lenin contended in 1909 that consciousness emerges as a mere byproduct of matter, like the brain and nerves, clashing with Gentile’s interpretation of Marx’s dialectical subject-object fusion. In 1914, Lenin insisted Marx wholly repudiated idealism — a profound and willful misreading:

"Sensation depends on the brain, nerves, retina, etc., i.e., on matter organised in a definite way. The existence of matter does not depend on sensation. Matter is primary. Sensation, thought, consciousness are the supreme product of matter organised in a particular way. Such are the views of materialism in general, and of Marx and Engels in particular."

— Vladimir Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-criticism

Lenin, in Karl Marx A Brief Biographical Sketch With An Exposition of Marxism, would also explicitly state that Marx had decisively rejected idealism. Yet the Soviet Union’s publication between 1932 and 1939 of Marx’s previously inaccessible Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and The German Ideology largely corroborated Giovanni Gentile’s earlier interpretation rather than Lenin’s. As Gareth Stedman Jones has argued, these works — along with the Theses on Feuerbach — reveal Marx’s sharp critique of vulgar materialism, placing him significantly closer to Gentile’s neo-Hegelian reading than to the vulgar materialism that Lenin championed.

“According to Engels, [Marx] developed his new ‘materialist conception of history’ between his completion of The Holy Family in the autumn of 1844 and his reunion with Engels in Brussels in the spring of 1845. During these months, Karl did not publish anything. The only piece of relevant documentation, which Engels discovered when going through papers dating from that period, was a two-page entry in one of Karl’s notebooks, entitled Ad Feuerbach.”

“But it has recently been demonstrated that it was ‘factitiously’ put together by Riazanov and his associates in the 1920s. The purpose of its publication during the early years of the Soviet Union was to complete the exposition of ‘Marxism’ as a system by connecting what Karl in 1859 had called a process of ‘self clarification’ with Engels’ claim about Karl’s development of ‘the materialist conception of history’ in 1885.”

— Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion

Lucio Colletti observed that the Manuscripts received a frigid reception in the Stalin era for omitting Engels’s “dialectics of nature” — Engels’s three universal dialectical laws: quantity into quality, interpenetration of opposites, and negation of negation — with East German officials banishing them from Marx’s core canon in the 1950s:

“The immediate reasons for the resistances and perplexities they aroused in Marxist circles were certainly of a theoretical nature… Nevertheless, the sheer rigidity of official doctrine, the rigor mortis which already gripped Marxism under Stalin, contributed in no small way to the cool reception which the writings met with… What made the [Manuscripts of 1844] appear so ‘out of line’ with Marxism was their profound dissimilarity to ‘dialectical materialism’. They said nothing at all about the dialectics of nature; nothing which prepared the way for Engels’s theory of the three basic dialectical laws of the universe.”

— Lucio Colletti, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

A. James Gregor noted that Marx’s daughter Eleanor burned his letters in 1895 to prevent “embarrassing” Engels, suggesting deep-seated rifts — Engels claimed in 1885 that Marx formulated a “materialist conception,” but Marx’s 1844–1845 notes veered sharply idealistic. Soviet archivist David Riazanov artificially assembled chapters in The German Ideology, inserting a fabricated “I. Feuerbach” section in 1924, a manipulation exposed by Terrell Carver in 1983. Georg Lukács conceded in 1923 that Marx’s early writings reveal a Hegelian idealism suppressed by later Marxist-Leninist dogma:

"We do know that Marx did not confide all his opinions to Engels and what the judgment on the epistemology of his compatriot might have been we shall probably never know, since Marx's daughter took it upon herself to destroy her father's correspondence with his wife; a vandalism undertaken in order to avoid 'embarrassment' to Engels."

— A. James Gregor, Giovanni Gentile and The Philosophy of The Young Karl Marx

Gentile’s ultimate verdict was merciless: Marx’s philosophy is an “eclecticism of contradictory elements,” a chaotic mishmash of promising ideas that fail to cohere, utterly unworthy of the label “Marxism” as a coherent realistic philosophy. Louis Althusser argued in 1965 that Marx’s early works exhibit a “humanist” orientation incompatible with his later materialism. Leszek Kołakowski highlighted that historical materialism hinges on an unsubstantiated premise — that material conditions dictate consciousness — bereft of any empirical foundation. Karl Popper contended that Marx’s historical materialism is unfalsifiable, branding it pseudoscientific since it evades testing or refutation. Isaiah Berlin noted in 1939 that Marx’s fusion of Hegelian dialectics with materialism yields an “unstable synthesis,” as the paradigms are inherently incompatible. Gentile’s precocious insight — framing Marx as a failed Hegelian — strikes at the heart, exposing his philosophy as a bankrupt fraud:

"We will say, therefore, in conclusion, that an eclecticism of contradictory elements is the general character of this philosophy of Marx; of which some of his disciples today are perhaps not greatly wrong in not knowing what to do. There are many fruitful ideas at its foundation, which taken separately are worthy of meditation: but isolated they do not belong, as has been proved, to Marx, nor can they therefore justify that word 'Marxism,' which is sought to be synonymous with a purely realistic philosophy."

— Giovanni Gentile, The Philosophy of Marx

Despite Gentile’s incisive critique exposing Marxism’s philosophical inconsistencies — particularly the unresolved tension between its Hegelian dialectical roots and materialist claims — the tradition has staggered on through desperate adaptations that only compound its flaws. Marxist thinkers like Louis Althusser attempted to salvage coherence by positing an “epistemological break,” distinguishing between a young, Marx (with an emphasis on alienation and humanism) and a mature, scientific Marx focused on structural analysis in works like Capital. This move aimed to sideline the idealist elements Gentile highlighted, reframing Marxism as a rigorous science of history and economy rather than a muddled neo-Hegelianism.

Yet Althusser’s work failed to paper over these cracks, as it ignores how the early humanist strands persist and infect later developments — even after the Theses on Feuerbach, which supposedly marked a shift toward materialism. These humanist elements endure in twisted form, deserving scrutiny in offshoots like Maoism, where Mao Zedong’s emphasis on voluntarism and the “Mass Line” elevates subjective consciousness and human will over objective material conditions, positing man as the master of reality in a manner that echoes unresolved idealism rather than consistent materialism. Even more grotesquely, they manifest in North Korea’s Juche ideology, which grafts “people-centered” humanism onto Marxist-Leninism, prioritizing individual agency, willful consciousness, and human sovereignty over deterministic matter — reverting to idealist notions of spirit and will that Gentile identified as Marxism’s fatal contradiction.

Western Marxists, such as Georg Lukács and Antonio Gramsci, seized on Gentile’s observations not to dismantle the points but to patch it up, reviving humanism and alienation within Marxism by incorporating more Hegelian elements and critiquing “vulgar materialism.” Lukács, in his 1923 History and Class Consciousness, acknowledged the Hegelian idealism in Marx’s early works but weaponized it to emphasize praxis as a dialectical interplay of subject and object, where consciousness actively shapes reality. Gramsci, influenced by Italian Hegelianism including Croce, developed his theory of hegemony and cultural superstructure, transforming Marxism into a philosophy that privileges ideological consciousness and human agency beyond crude economic determinism, further entangling it in the idealist web Gentile exposed.

This so-called evolution merely illustrates Marxism’s chronic eclecticism: rather than resolving Gentile’s “eclecticism of contradictory elements,” it spawns diverse strands — from critical theory to the idealist-tinged aberrations in the far east — that perpetuate the same self-contradictory fraud, where consciousness emerges as an unmoored force akin to Hegel’s absolute spirit. Defenders who concede Gentile’s points often qualify them narrowly — as philosopher Maurice A. Finocchiaro argued in his 1975 review in The Thomist, interpreting Gentile’s intent as showing Marx’s philosophy is “valid insofar as it is Hegelian and invalid otherwise” — a circular dismissal that flips the narrative but rests on self-validating assertions without refuting the core contradictions. In the end, Gentile’s early foresight proves mercilessly accurate, unmasking Marx as a “bad Marxist” whose bankrupt philosophy continues to breed incoherent hybrids of materialism and idealism, its metaphysical foundations not just shaky but irredeemably fractured. Marxism is a lie.