I'm sure you're aware of this and it's probably only assumed because of like-minded company, but my issue with this at face-value is that there seems to be an assumed normative characterization seemingly built-in to the framing, which in its conflation of the "is" and "ought" inherently sort of loses that materially anchored rationale that drove the outcome towards a particular party's perceived interest. In other words, so long as class creates foundational antagonistic social divides through orientation of their zero-sum material benefit at the others' cost, one man's "political disaster" is another man's political godsend. So like "...whose end goal is to actually improve material conditions" for whom?
Cui bono? Who benefits? I'm reminded of Michael Parenti:
“In their perpetual confusion, some liberal critics conclude that foreign aid and IMF and World Bank structural adjustments ‘do not work’; the end result is less self-sufficiency and more poverty for the recipient nations, they point out. Why then do the rich member states continue to fund the IMF and World Bank? Are their leaders just less intelligent than the critics who keep pointing out to them that their policies are having the opposite effect? No, it is the critics who are stupid not the western leaders and investors who own so much of the world and enjoy such immense wealth and success. They pursue their aid and foreign loan programs because such programs do work. The question is, work for whom? Cui bono?”
Otherwise it seems kind of just like historical materialism broadly speaking, which has tons of literature and already existing podcasts and stuff.
You might like We're Not So Different which had a whole historical materialist series looking at the trajectory of humanity broadly, from its roots in primitive tribal relations of hunter-gatherers and such to now. Or the Antifada's History is a Weapon series with recurrent mentat Matt Christman.
MF_COOM directly answered dis, but here's some perhaps relevant consideration from that Marx guy.
Also see: duplicitous SPD in interwar Germany under Ebert, Constantine's recuperation of Christianity effectively neutering its symbolic class conscious political potential under the rebranded "Holy" Roman Empire, etc.