Marxism as an economic theory failed most as soon as the mewling babe was out of the crib. In a piece reprinted in the Epoch Times by permission from The Daily Signal, a publication of The Heritage Foundation – “The Coup in Search of a Philosophy” -- Surse Pierpoint tells us: “In 1925, John Maynard Keynes dismissed Marx’s ‘Capital’ as an obsolete economic textbook that no serious economist would still assign. He was not being contrarian. By the time he wrote that, the marginal revolution of the 1870s had already done the intellectual work: Jevons, Menger, Walras, and later Wicksteed, Marshall, and Böhm-Bawerk had dismantled the labor theory of value that Marx’s entire economic system rested on. Among economists, the argument was over, and Marx had lost it.”
Henry Ford is reported to have said about history, “History
is bunk.” Shortly after Das Capital
had been loosed on the world, economic “experts” pronounced Marx’s theory of
value -- bunk. In years following, history would prove Marx’s critics right.
Under Marx’s theory of value, anything produced independently of state orders
withers and becomes valueless on empty shelves.
Most Americans are not familiar with the historical interaction
between Marx and Abraham Lincoln. Marx wrote columns that were picked up by New
York newspapers. Marx and Engels wrote a
book on the American Civil War, heavy with economic discursions, and sent it to
Lincoln, who referred it to one of his cabinet members, possibly as a form of
intellectual punishment. In one of his speeches, Lincoln later presented his
own non-Marxian theory of labor.
The indirect interaction between Marx and Lincoln is
mentioned in Connecticut Commentary here in: “Lincoln Alive: His Relevance To Modern
Politics.”
Here is Lincoln on the real relation of labor to capital: “Labor is the superior of capital, and
deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as
worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that there is, and
probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital producing mutual
benefits. The error is in assuming that the whole labor of community exists
within that relation. A few men own capital, and that few avoid labor
themselves, and with their capital hire or buy another few to labor for them. A
large majority belong to neither class--neither work for others nor have others
working for them. In most of the Southern States a majority of the whole people
of all colors are neither slaves nor masters, while in the Northern a large
majority are neither hirers nor hired. Men, with their families--wives, sons,
and daughters--work for themselves on their farms, in their houses, and in
their shops, taking the whole product to themselves, and asking no favors of
capital on the one hand nor of hired laborers or slaves on the other. It is not
forgotten that a considerable number of persons mingle their own labor with
capital; that is, they labor with their own hands and also buy or hire others
to labor for them; but this is only a mixed and not a distinct class. No principle
stated is disturbed by the existence of this mixed class… Again, as has already been said, there is
not of necessity any such thing as the free hired laborer being fixed to that
condition for life. Many independent men everywhere in these States a few years
back in their lives were hired laborers. The prudent, penniless beginner in the
world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land
for himself, then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires
another new beginner to help him. This is the just and generous and prosperous
system which opens the way to all, gives hope to all, and consequent energy and
progress and improvement of condition to all. No men living are more worthy to be trusted than those who toil up from
poverty; none less inclined to take or touch aught which they have not honestly
earned. Let them beware of surrendering a political power which they already
possess, and which if surrendered will surely be used to close the door of
advancement against such as they and to fix new disabilities and burdens upon
them till all of liberty shall be lost (emphasis mine).”
In his brief essay, Pierpoint asks precisely the right
question: “Before 1917, Marx was known
among rival socialist faction economists who had already rejected him. After
1917, the Russian state needed a founding philosophy for what was, in plain
terms, a seizure of power. It got one, retroactively, by making Marx a
household name... What the data supports is narrower and more interesting: a
discontinuous jump in mainstream legitimacy, arriving exactly when a regime
needed intellectual cover, not when a new argument appeared to justify one. Here is the part economists tend to miss and
sociologists tend to bury. If the economic argument was already lost by 1917,
and the Soviet revolution supplied prestige rather than proof, what explains the durability of Marxist
categories in Western universities, long after the calculation debate was
settled and the planned economies it inspired had produced the most devastating
body counts of the 20th century (emphasis mine)?”
A similar question perplexed Antonio Gramsci, an Italian
communist imprisoned by the fascists in the 1920 s: Why did the communist
revolution “emerge in backward, agrarian Russia rather than in the advanced
industrial economies [as] Marx had predicted? His answer was that Western
societies are governed as much by cultural consent—manufactured through
schools, churches, and media—as by direct economic control. A frontal seizure of
the state, as in the Bolshevik model, would not work in the West. What would
work was a slower ‘war of position’: a patient occupation of the institutions
that manufacture consent.”
Connecticut Commentary mentioned Gramsci here five years ago
in Connecting The Dots: Critical Race Theory
And Gramsci Marxism:
Communism could
succeed in highly developed states, Gramsci theorized, if it were first to
infiltrate and overcome cultural institutions: the family, the school, the
artistic community, the church, political parties, media outlets, independent
court systems, and most especially, a Western prophylactic that would prevent
the rise to power of new Caesars such as Hitler in Germany and Stalin in Russia
– constitutional government and the division of political power into three co-equal and separate branches of
government. These stubborn, organic modalities of Western civilization are what
G.K. Chesterton and others used to call “the little platoons of democracy.”
Once undermined, the resistance to the communist state among developed nations
would collapse. The phrase most often associated with this process was later called
“the long march through the institutions.” Critical Race Theory has replaced
class with race in its slow march through our post-modern pedagogical
wilderness, but its end point is Gramscian Marxism. The Critical Race Theorist
sees race everywhere. It lies at the root of all social disorders. It is the
noose with which the theorist may hang the whole of western history; for the
principal mission of Critical Race Theory is to change history by a quiet
revolution in which the march of boots into the future is heard only as
pleasant applause.
Despite its longstanding economic buffoonery – socialism always
runs out of other people’s money because it is a frontal attack on free market
creativity. But communism never-the-less can succeed in a war on culture by
patiently sapping and undermining what Chesterton called “the little platoons
of democracy.” To put it bluntly, modern, reinvented Marxism of a kind actively
supported by the American Democratic Socialists (ADS) is profoundly
anti-democratic, anti-religious and anti-cultural. It relies upon anarchism to
sow the ground for a future cloud-coo-coo-land utopia.
Pierpont notes: “The
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) did not arrive at their current position
by accident. In August 2025, DSA delegates voted to remove a long-standing
constitutional provision barring Leninists from entry, ratifying what internal
factions had already been calling a ‘big tent’ strategy: build numbers first,
sort out doctrine later (emphasis mine). The numbers came. By the summer of 2026, DSA-aligned
candidates had unseated sitting Democratic incumbents in New York and Colorado,
captured a Senate nomination in Maine over a sitting governor, and pushed a
mayoral runoff in Los Angeles—a run of primary victories serious enough that
Third Way’s Jon Cowan and Matt Bennett, hardly outside agitators, warned in The
Washington Post on July 1 that the party needed to confront the movement rather
than continue appeasing it.”
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