Bonus nonsense:
Glittering Images by Camille Paglia
I stopped reading after this horrendous introduction. I would describe the prose as Redditor adjacent. The author identifies as a civil rights era liberal and atheist, while condemning black art and Piss Christ. There were some pretty pictures in the book tho. I don't know who this author lady is/was but she sucks. 2/10
E: if you look this lady up, as many in the comments have done already, turns out she's a racist, transphobic pedophile. classic anticommunist
Well, you can do this, and a lot of sci fi does, but it's not the best possible analysis you can make. If you treat the magic or sufficiently advanced technology as its own thing, you can approach it with a somewhat unique analysis, which I tend to appreciate a lot more. But honestly, mapping it 1:1 at least allows some form of Marxist analysis, which is better than what you'll actually find in the vast majority of fantasy and sci-fi writing.
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Coming up with novel conflicts in the new system is what makes things really fresh and unique. I think Asimov did a decent job with this in Foundation where the primary contradictions went necessarily class based, but instead information based.
Still, just ripping off the world historical dialectic conditions creates a relating and compelling story/world. Mainly because it's easy for the reader to parse and understand, while also making it easy to keep track of.
Indeed.
I know a few people who claim to hate Marxism and couldn't tell you what dialectical materialism is, and then they turn around and say the stories with a believable dialectical analysis are good worldbuilding and the ones that don't bother really suck.
I hate dealing with liberals.
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