And yet, it was not Marx or Hegel who took over the country and started campaign on Red Terror. And Lenin did not need to cite Das Kapital to start Russian Civil War. (I have no doubt he was inspired by it though)
(It's an interesting thought experiment what would have happened if there were no Karl Marx. February Revolution would have happened anyway.. but would bolsheviks still exist? Would Lenin still do all the things he did anyway, or would he become a civil servant instead?)
And for the most striking example, consider how different the 20th century would have looked if Academy of Fine Arts Vienna would have accepted a certain applicant from Linz. Does this mean fine arts educational institutions are very important in the political life?
Lenin wasn't only "inspired" by Marx, he wasn't even the first Russian socialist. Marxism was simply the framework that a lot of the socialist revolutionaries at that time were operating in (including ones that Lenin ended up opposing later).
Sure, given the economic and political realities of Russia at that time, something might have happened even if Marx hadn't existed, but it might have looked very different.
Philosophy matters to the world because other people read philosophy and are inspired by it to change something about the world. The French Revolution, US independence, Latin American independence and so on were all undertaken in no small part by people who had read a lot and were trying to make some of their ideals reality.
(It's an interesting thought experiment what would have happened if there were no Karl Marx. February Revolution would have happened anyway.. but would bolsheviks still exist? Would Lenin still do all the things he did anyway, or would he become a civil servant instead?)
And for the most striking example, consider how different the 20th century would have looked if Academy of Fine Arts Vienna would have accepted a certain applicant from Linz. Does this mean fine arts educational institutions are very important in the political life?