Socialists helped ruin the earth in a mere 200 years and are now subscribing to the Elon Musk death cult delusions of "sustainability and clean energy". I wonder why???
Will Bakunin accuse the Americans of a "war of conquest", which, although it deals with a severe blow to his theory based on "justice and humanity", was nevertheless waged wholly and solely in the interest of civilization? Or is it perhaps unfortunate that splendid California has been taken away from the lazy Mexicans, who could not do anything with it? That the energetic Yankees by rapid exploitation of the California gold mines will increase the means of circulation, in a few years will concentrate a dense population and extensive trade at the most suitable places on the coast of the Pacific Ocean, create large cities, open up communications by steamship, construct a railway from New York to San Francisco, for the first time really open the Pacific Ocean to civilization, and for the third time in history give the world trade a new direction? The "independence" of a few Spanish Californians and Texans may suffer because of it, in someplaces "justice" and other moral principles may be violated; but what does that matter to such facts of world-historic significance?
When middle class failsons like Will Menaker talk about "socialism or barbarism", this is what they mean. They literally identity more with the Roman slave oligarch empire instead of the indigenous "barbarians" who were subject to their "civilization"
I don't know if the Newton comparison is apt, considering that, maybe barring Marx's critique of political economy, Marxism is mostly philosophy. It's not a precise and clear-cut field like physics or mathematics, you could absolutely get two people to read the same text and get two different interpretations. Both Lenin and Khrushchev are technically Marxists for example, right?
If the goal is just to get a clearer understanding of what socialism is, then I agree, you could absolutely understand a lot of it without ever reading Marx. But, just like you wouldn't become a expert on dialectics by watching a 5 min video on Hegel, if you're looking for a better understanding of Marx's ideas in regards to socialism, the best explanation you could get is from Marx himself. Some things just take more clarification than a couple formulas on a page, especially extremely abstract concepts that require a lot of historical context like dialectical materialism, and I sure as fuck wouldn't want the vanguard party of the 21st century to be educated solely through Breadtube vids lmfao.
With that being said, I wholeheartedly agree that it should be like what you're describing in your second paragraph. I don't think we've reached that point yet where you can ignore Marx entirely, but it should be our jobs to bring his ideas into the modern era and summarize and distill them to the point that it would make reading Marx obsolete. Imagine a collectively-written, dumbed-down, illustrated version of Capital, for example. For that to happen, though, some of us are gonna have to do the reading.