Marxist foundations of capitalistic returns

It's 2026 and I find myself reading geopolitical analysis more than ever. I picked up Geopolitical Alpha by Marko Papic and barely made it through the introduction before something stopped me cold.

Papic's analytical framework rests on materialist dialectic as its foundation - the idea that material conditions determine how societies and individuals behave.

This sounded incredibly familiar. Last year I wrote about how economic conditions are the main driver of social behavior. I'd reached that conclusion independently, working through my own observations about how financial pressures shape life decisions.

Then I learned where materialist dialectic came from: Karl Marx.

I had to stop reading.

I'd arrived at the same philosophical foundation Marx used, without ever reading Marx. The irony hit me immediately: here I am, a capitalist trader trying to understand markets, and I've been thinking like Marx without knowing it.

Even stranger: I found this out from a book about how to use geopolitics for investing returns.

I guess this gives me my first actual reason to read Marx - not for ideology, but because he apparently figured out the same pattern recognition framework I've been using. The universe has a sense of humor about these things.