I’m helping to build an instance, and we had a debate recently on whether Platonism is left-winged or right-winged. It’s an ancient philosophy, mind you. Created by Plato. One small side said it was right-winged, one small side said it was left-winged, and the majority said it couldn’t be either. Someone remarked “what do you mean it’s neither? Marx cited him!” Admittedly it’s frustrating when you’re researching these things so you can give it a respectful comparative review and someone says “you can’t judge people of ancient times based on your left-right mode of measurement” in a world where something like whether Obama can do a public prank April Fool’s Day is a “political” issue (remember when he said he was building Iron Man as an April Fool’s joke and everyone on the right claimed it was unprofessional while the left enjoyed his sense of humor). That’s somehow more worthy to put under the microscope than Plato, the world’s first “public” philosopher (after Socrates and Thales who weren’t of specific opinions and Ptahhotep who was more of a superior advocating an approach that worked for him)?
In my eyes at this point, as well as the eyes of the groups I help out in, everything is equally politicized as a default; that is, “politicization” is what the individual makes of it at a given moment. But I know that isn’t how the world operates. Marx himself was known to write about an enormous number of topics, from faraway cultures to appropriate punishments for oddly specific crimes. How does the inherent potential of everything that exists to be politicized square with the idea that certain things are also inherently seen as non-left-or-right based on the circumstances that they hold in their own setting?
Henry Thomas Buckle once noted that “[people] were divided into three classes mentally. The first and lowest class talk of persons; the second talk about [things and events]; the third and highest about ideas.” As you noted, Marx wrote on many fields of thought, not all of them related to communism, socialism, and socio-economics, but few if any have engaged with his ideas beyond knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that “Marx Bad.”
Does that truly make everything he said political? I suppose that depends on how you define politics. Is politics truly a dialogue of ideas, or is it as cheap as “My team vs not my team”, and if it’s the latter, how does one draw team lines? Define it loosely enough and I can make a ham sandwich political. “Ham isn’t kosher, ergo anti-semitic, leftists hate Israel, your ham sandwich is COMMUNIST!” As absurd as that chain of thought is, it’s no more absurd than defining an April Fools joke as political.
On the other hand, can we truly call ideas political? The vast majority of people agree on far more ideas than they disagree on and yet choose to define each other as “other” based more on semantics than real ideological differences. I would argue then that, in spite of Plato’s high minded ideals in “the republic” “politics” is less about the honest evaluation and synthesis of ideas but actually little more than a rhetorical expression of frustration in the least rational and deliberative of ways.
Ergo indeed, Socrates is political, and the ham sandwich is clearly a terrorist.