The Red Guardian

Marx’s ideas and conclusions were (and still are) wrong, but even wrong is popular these days.

If you think the contemporary ideological left has a screw or two loose, I’m not going to argue with you.

Their reflexive and flexible opposition to everything they don’t like is only equaled by their willing acceptance of anything or anyone who fits their needs of the moment, including kooks and loons (who should not be roaming free society without adult supervision) and frauds (the backstories of whom are just too damn good to check).

I don’t know if the Jason Arday thing has crossed your desk yet, but Arday is the guy who became internationally celebrated after his 2023 appointment as the youngest black professor in the University of Cambridge’s history, with his inspiring personal story of overcoming autism, delayed speech, and significant childhood challenges becoming central to his public image.

But it now appears that Arday’s story was just too DEI perfect to check. Cambridge has opened a formal investigation into allegations of plagiarism involving his academic work, including questions about the originality of portions of his PhD dissertation and later publications (according to sources he lifted entire sections of the work of others) and his public biography appears to be a work of fiction - including reported visiting academic appointments, athletic achievements, and charitable fundraising accomplishments, with several institutions stating they could not verify or disputed aspects of those claims.

Arday resigned from Cambridge this week, while the university’s investigation remains ongoing and of course, the left is accusing the rest of the world of racism as the cause rather than Arday’s fakery.

I would argue that Arday (and going back to the frauds that leftist organizations have elevated over the years) was lauded, not because of a history of actual accomplishment, but as an opportunity to poke political enemies in the eye with the DEI sharp stick.

If Arday didn’t exist, they would have invented him – and that is exactly what they did. This scandal shows that ideas do not spread necessarily because they are true, they often spread because they satisfy some social, political or other human need.

One of the greatest mistakes people make is assuming that history is a meritocracy. We like to believe that the best ideas naturally rise to the top while weak ideas quietly disappear under the weight of evidence. It is a comforting belief because it suggests that truth eventually wins on its own. Contrary to that assumption, history shows that ideas rarely triumph because they have survived rigorous intellectual scrutiny. More often, they triumph because they satisfy an emotional need, provide a moral narrative, create a sense of belonging, or become useful to people seeking power.

An idea does not have to be true to become influential. It simply must be useful.

I think the case of Karl Marx provides one of history’s clearest examples.

I’ve studied a fair amount about crazy Uncle Karl because I wanted to understand why humans keep wabbling their fingers back to the fire created by an arsonist and expecting not to be burned again.

Today, love him or hate him, Marx is arguably considered one of the architects of the modern world. Personally, I think he is an Oprah Winfrey Book Club level fraud just like Cambridge’s Jason Arday and yet entire governments were built upon his theories.

One should note that during his own lifetime he persuaded remarkably few of the leading economists or philosophers of Europe. His work was respected by some, criticized by many, and largely ignored by most of the academic establishment. If intellectual acceptance alone determined history, Marx would likely occupy a footnote alongside dozens of other nineteenth-century social theorists.

Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin was one of Marx’s harshest critics and his criticism has proven particularly noteworthy in hindsight. While agreeing that capitalism often produced exploitation, he warned that Marx’s proposed “dictatorship of the proletariat” would inevitably become a dictatorship over the proletariat itself – and that is exactly what has happened every single stinking time it is tried.

Marx’s genius may have been less economic than narrative. He offered an extraordinarily simple explanation for the complexity of civilization. Every social conflict became a class conflict, every institution became an instrument of power, and every injustice became prima facie evidence that history itself was moving toward an inevitable conclusion.

Whether those propositions were ultimately correct almost became secondary because they provided something every successful political movement requires: a story that explained the world in terms ordinary people could understand.

Marxism got a huge boost from the Russian revolution in the early 1900’s but I think evidence shows that Marx’s theories were adopted as a basis because, rather than being intellectually solid, they served a political purpose. The leaders of the “revolution”, then as is true today, needed a rallying cry that fit on a banner. Marx gave them that.

We often imagine ourselves carefully weighing evidence before arriving at conclusions, but psychology suggests almost the opposite. We instinctively adopt narratives that reinforce our identities, our loyalties, and our moral intuitions, then recruit facts afterward to defend positions we have already accepted emotionally. We are not nearly as rational as we flatter ourselves into believing.

That reality helps explain why ideas that struggle in universities often flourish in politics. Universities reward nuance, uncertainty, competing explanations, and careful qualification (or they once did) while politics rewards confidence, moral clarity, memorable slogans, and villains. The scholar says, “The evidence suggests.” The politician says, “I know who is to blame.”

Guess which one grabs eyeballs and earholes these days…

The danger begins when we mistake popularity for proof.

In the same way “racism” gives the charlatans and race baiters an easy criticism of anything that happens to a racial minority, Marxism gave workers an easy and convenient explanation for exploitation that promised eventual justice.

The problem was that Marx frequently selected evidence that illustrated his theory while giving comparatively little attention to contrary evidence. For example, he predicted increasing immiseration of workers and the collapse of capitalism, yet capitalism adapted through rising productivity, expanding middle classes, labor reforms, and technological innovation in ways he did not anticipate.

If that reminds you of Saint Anthony of Fauci and his loyal Faucian sycophants, it should.

Social media has only accelerated this tendency. The algorithms do not reward the best-supported argument. They reward the most emotionally engaging one. Outrage travels farther than evidence. Certainty spreads faster than nuance. Identity overwhelms inquiry. In many ways, technology has amplified instincts that have always existed.

Perhaps that is the enduring lesson of crazy Uncle Karl. His influence tells us less about whether his theories were right (spoiler alert: hundreds of millions of deaths prove they aren’t) than about how ideas spread.

Today, we would call Marx an “influencer”. He did not become one of history’s most consequential figures because he persuaded every economist or philosopher. He became one because millions of people found his story compelling enough to organize their politics, their revolutions, and eventually their governments around it.

Much to humanity’s detriment.