I'm pretty sure the culture war is an unintentional proxy, and Marx was neither a Marxist nor a Postmodernist.

I don't want to be all conspiracy, and I'm not intending to be. Let me play "postmodernist" for just a second and then follow along if you want to. In recent and current year, "culture" is being "deconstructed." That much is simply true. Every institution of western culture is being picked apart from every conceivable angle. Deconstruction has a synonym: demolition.

Marx was an "Enlightenment" theorist. He was, in part, trying to reasonably and rationally describe the realities and difficulties to, and stemming from, Big "C" Capitalism. Set aside your post-(disastrous)-20th century conceptions for a second and think back to what you know about 14-1900s, and what were the western norms prior to, and then during, early colonization by European powers. The vast majority of western history was about a peasantry, a priestly class of tradition keepers, aristocratic placeholders, and heroes/warlords. It may have seemed stratified then, and it certainly seems so in hindsight, but for most of western history we all starved if the crops failed no matter how high off the hog our protein was cut from. The gap was far more about cultural esteem than wealth. Mercantile corptocracy and expansionism changed that. The wages of commerce within an expanded environment began to accumulate to the shrewed, industrious, and adventurous, and somehow the peasantry became disassociated from the "ruling classes." Marx saw, from a mid 19th century perspective, that the ties that formerly existed between a productive peasant folk and the hopefully wise governing class were being severed. Previous traditions that evolved to hold things together were being usurped by new social technologies that, while lifting all to a more predictable state of sustenance, were at the same time creating a new sort of stratification within western culture that involved, for the first time, and real and undeniable wealth distribution gap. Modernity was building a system that would eventually reduce the citizenry to those with capital, and those with nothing to provide as contribution but labor today for sustenance tonight. The wealth gap.

Revolution, socialism, and communism weren't suggestions, but predictions. Well, he was right about revolution. The other ideas seem to fail in practice. We're in a war by proxy. The prediction of Marx of a capitalist ruling class and a disgruntled everyone else was very close, but he was oh, so wrong about the solution. The solution we're seeing isn't the workers owning the means of production. The solution is the ruling class owning the narrative. The culture war is a proxy. He who has the gold makes the rules? Nope. He who owns the narrative makes the rules.

We need to change the narrative. We need to make it a conversation. Modern Capitalism is all fucked up and we know it. So is every attempt a Peoples' State. Distribution of prosperity is all fucked up and we all know it. From each and to each doesn't work. Oppression is a fact of the human conditions, not a social construct. We're grappling all around the edges of what needs to come up with, but owning a winning narrative seems to be the major goal of the day among those who rule the means of producing cultural expectations.

If you read all of that, I apologize.