Life & Wisdom Quote by Alan Moore

Moore is doing that very British thing: flattering an idea while quietly stabbing it. By framing Marxism as Popperian "World Three" - the realm of objective, culture-made abstractions like theories, arguments, and stories - he treats it less like a program you can point to and more like a self-propagating artifact. Marxism, in this telling, isn’t a factory, a party, or a state; it’s a conceptual machine that can survive any one of its failed embodiments because it never fully "arrives" in matter.

The line "you couldn't actually hold up anything in the world" is the blade. It punctures the lazy move of equating Marxism with whatever regime or policy someone wants to praise or indict. Moore isn’t exonerating Marxism from history so much as diagnosing why it stays politically radioactive: everyone argues about the map while pointing at different territories. That ungraspability becomes its strength (it can inspire across contexts) and its liability (it can be endlessly retrofitted to justify outcomes).

Popper is a loaded reference, too. Popper famously attacked Marxism as unfalsifiable - a theory that can absorb counterevidence by reinterpreting it. Moore borrows Popper without fully signing on: he’s acknowledging Marxism’s narrative power as a world-building schema, a mythos with explanatory force. Coming from a comics writer who understands how ideas become real through symbols, the subtext is almost meta: politics runs on the same infrastructure as fiction, and the most durable forces in history are often the ones you can’t physically point to.