any existentialist who utters the phrase ‘the universe is irrational’ means to say something about it sucks because he doesn’t like it. mortality, natural disaster, disease, war, famine, poverty, Entertainment Tonight, etc. but all this has nothing to do with ‘rationality’ in the way that the existentialist wants to believe. the universe is no less ‘rational’ because of these things, and its only because the existentialist finds it disagreeable at times that he would say such a thing. this is why existentialism that continues to linger after its done its 19th century work - the death of god, the lack of objective values and ultimate purpose, yada yada - becomes a liability. it encourages ‘wallowing’, and wallowing is precisely what conservatives want/need the working classes to do to slow progress.
for a marxist, all of this process is ‘lawful’ in the sense that it follows a natural order… and the marxist is only describing what’s happening and why it’s happening. it doesn’t say anything about what ‘ought’ to happen… because when you start making claims about what ought to happen, you start inserting values and doing philosophy. and that’s what we want to avoid because when you do that, you become a mouthpiece for a particular set of prejudices and convictions that reflect more about you than the facts about the world. a philosopher loves nothing more than accidentally distorting reality on purpose.
so no, a marxist would never say ‘the goddamn working class should own the means of production’… but what he will say is something like ‘after an extensive analysis of historical trends and the general direction of the course of human evolution and development, there’s a damn good chance the working class will end up owning the means of production.’
now people can do with that what they want - criticize it, lambaste it, condemn it, whatever - but that don’t change nothing and it says more about what a particular person stands to lose than it does about the actual facts of the world. a philosopher will do back-flips to try and convince you that this should never be, but all you’re hearing is a distress call from a person who’s becoming more and more nervous as the world rapidly changes.
anyway yeah existentialism was a critically important stage in philosophy since it demolished damn near everything but analytical philosophy. its purpose was to assist in the deconstruction of ruling-class ideology that has persisted for over a thousand years, and clear the way for radical social and economic change. there’s a pattern to all this, bro. in fact i think i bantered a bit about it in my first or second post here… the progression from platonism to enlightenment realism to structuralism to post-structuralism something something something.
really all that’s left is analytical/structural marxism and nihilism. all the other nonsense has been formally usurped and exists now only in the personal memoirs of forum philosophers and independent authors coming to a bookstore shelf near you (again… and again… and again. i know, right. like give it up already).