American Thought Leaders - Karl Marx and the Mythology Surrounding His Rise: Phillip Magness

Episode Date: August 8, 2024

Karl Marx died in obscurity in 1883, with only about a dozen people attending his funeral. Even socialist magazines took little notice of him at the time, says Phillip Magness, an economic historian and senior fellow at the Independent Institute. So how is it that he became such a major figure decades later?Magness decided to find out. In this episode, he breaks down his research into the origins of the popularity of Karl Marx.“What really put Marx on the intellectual map was not the weight of his contributions in Das Kapital. It’s not him engaging in major debates. It’s actually a political event,” Magness says.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

So there's kind of a paradox here. Marx is this vaunted intellectual who's the major figure of the late 19th century versus Marx, this guy that's so obscure that his funeral basically goes unnoticed and is not really discussed or talked about in any mainstream substantive way for several decades after his death. So I start investigating these claims. Phil Magnus is an economic historian and senior fellow at the Independent Institute. In this episode, he breaks down his research into the true origins of the popularity of Karl Marx. What really put Marx on the intellectual map was not the weight of his contributions in Das Kapital. It's not him engaging in major debates.

It's actually a political event. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Phil Magnus, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thanks for having me. So there's this, I guess, mythology about Karl Marx tapping into the zeitgeist of the 19th century, coming up with this grand idea, and suddenly it captures everyone's imagination and things take off. And you've done some really interesting work that suggests that this is really not the case. And I want to explore that today. So tell me about this. Absolutely. So Marx is very well known as like the founding figure of communist ideology.

He inspired tons of movements across the 20th century, the most famous being the Soviet Union, and is considered a major figure in the intellectual canon. And with this comes kind of this mythology that Marx had figured something out about the human condition in the 19th century. He had seen factory workers in poverty and in extreme situations in the workplace that were not good in the late 19th century and supposedly had figured out that this tapped into a major problem with free market capitalist economic exchanges and he had supposedly diagnosed that and predicted that something needed to give, something needed to change, or else there would be major problems for humanity going forward. And the notion that

Marx was kind of like this peer of all these other giants of the 19th century. So the one I'd like to point to is John Stuart Mill, who actually lived in the same neighborhood as Karl Marx in London for a period. Marx is presented as like he was this peer interlocutor of both the free market economists and other thinkers of his time, and just emerged in the 20th century out of the merits of his ideas as the major figure on the academic and philosophical left. And yet the reality is Marx died in near obscurity. There were about a dozen people that showed up at his funeral in 1883 when he passes away. And looking back on that event, so in the 20th century, there's a famous left-wing historian by the name of Philip Foner

who writes a book on Marx's funeral. And he goes to research the book expecting there are going to be all these outpourings of grief from the laboring classes across the world. And he writes in the intro to his book that he's surprised he's scouring newspapers. And the obituary for Karl Marx is barely even mentioned at all. Even socialist magazines are not noticing who this guy is. So there's kind of a paradox here. Marx is barely even mentioned at all. Even socialist magazines are not noticing who this guy is. So there's kind of a paradox here. Marx is this vaunted intellectual who's the major figure of the late 19th century versus Marx, this guy that's so obscure that his funeral basically goes unnoticed and is not really discussed or talked about in any mainstream substantive way for

several decades after his death. So I start investigating these claims, and other historians, other philosophers had posited this idea before. They said that what really put Marx on the intellectual map was not the weight of his contributions and Das Kapital. It's not him engaging in major debates. It's actually a political event. It's the Soviet Union. It's the Russian engaging in major debates. It's actually a political event. It's the Soviet Union.

It's the Russian Revolution of 1917. And what happens there, Lenin seizes power by a forcible coup d'etat, overthrows the previous government at a time of political weakness, and he uses the resources of the Russian state to start propagandizing Karl Marx. So that's basically where we get. Well, that's fascinating. You actually looked at this empirically, and I want to dig into that. I really want to dig into that in some detail, because you came up with a very elegant way of trying to assess, I guess, his intellectual influence over time. Right, right.

But before we go there, there's a lot of mythologies, like even just his intellectual influence over time. Right. Right. But before we go there, you know, there's a lot of mythologies, like even just around the Russian Revolution itself. Yeah. Right. I mean, yeah, everyone knows Lenin was a central figure. That no one debates. Exactly. Right. But was it really the working classes that were, you know, persecuted working classes that revolted? What actually happened there? So here's the fundamental contradiction of Marxist theory. Marx presents himself as a representative of the masses. His whole notion of histories, as the mechanism of history, is defined by a contest over material resources. And society has the haves and the have-nots.

And he looks around and he says, well, the have-nots are far more numerous than the haves. The proletariats outnumber the owners of capital. So all we need to do is to get them to rise up and seize the means of production. And this ushers in the new socialist age, basically. That's Marxist theory 101. And yet every time there's a revolution in Marx's name,

it's not this popular mass uprising. It's actually a small band of generally well-educated, probably upper middle class intellectuals, people that come from non-proletarian backgrounds, but found themselves interested in socialist and communist theorizing. And what they do is they stage revolutions, violent coup d'etats, often with very, very small bands. And that's what happens in 1917. So there are actually two Russian revolutions in 1917. One is early in the year. This is the tail end of World War I. The Russian state is destabilized. The Tsar abdicatesates and he hands control basically over to a quasi-elected government that has all sorts of different factions in it, but it's a very weak, unstable government.

Then Lenin arrives on the scene. He actually comes into Russia. He was released and allowed to travel through the German territories like a war tactic. They said, we're going to find all these rabble-rousers and we're going to dump them in St. Petersburg to weaken the enemy on the Eastern Front. So this is very much an intentional tactic to destabilize the Russian government. And Lenin does just that. He gets there with a very small band of dedicated Marxists. And in a moment of weakness, they storm in with guns a-blazing, seize power, quickly consolidate that power

by basically imprisoning or executing all of the opposition, eliminating the opposition, and it launches Russia into a civil war that Lenin eventually emerges victorious of. Now he has this myth that says that the population is behind him, because that's what Marxist theory predicts. But in reality, it's just a small band of ruffians from the intellectual classes. And Marxists come back and they try to legitimize this. There's a core doctrine in some branches of revolutionary Marxist theory they call vanguardism. And they say because the proletariats will not rise up on their own, they solve that problem.

They say, well, we're going to appoint ourselves as the representatives of the proletariat. We're the vanguard. And this comes even from Marx's writings. He says, we need the communist party to lead the way because if the people don't rise up on their own, no one will show them that. But vanguardism is basically Leninism, right? Yes, basically. So it's a more developed theory built on little certain lines of text in Marx that he morphs into a formal codify his whole version of communist thought most recently. There was Xi Jinping thought, but something more formal is kind of in the work. So it seems like every leader tries to do this sort of thing. But before we go there, tell me a little bit about yourself. Why do you know so much about this, and especially in a way that doesn't seem to be the mainstream or generally accepted view? Right. Yeah.

Well, I'm an economic historian by background, and I studied the 19th century, early 20th century, which is contemporary with these events. I also look at the history of economic thought. So it's the interchange of ideas between how economists are interpreting the world around them and then the actual economic events that are unfolding. So you take a figure like Marx. He is supposedly observing working class conditions in industrial revolution era, 19th century England. And it's supposedly a commentator on that. And he is to some degree.

I don't think he's as accurate of a commentator as the mainstream pro-Marxist view says about him. But he's nonetheless a figure of that time. So it just always interested me, how was Marx received? How was Marx understood in his own time? And it turns out he's barely noticed at all. Right. Well, and one of the things that I've certainly didn't grasp until, let's say, the last decade is when I thoroughly have become aware of it, is the true power of propaganda. Yeah.

It's incredibly powerful. Yeah. It has an incredible impact on even the most resistant people. And so, I mean, you're making the case that it's the propaganda that basically vaulted him into this position. It's the political events surrounding the Russian Revolution and the mythology they constructed. And you see this immediately. One of Lenin's first things he does after he comes to power in Russia is to start basically making a state cult around the figure of Karl Marx. And he commissioned statues. We've all seen the infamous propaganda posters where they have Marx and Engels and Lenin lined up side by side.

He's trying to present himself as the heir apparent of Marxist ideology and the person that's going to carry this forth into the next century. He's the person that enlivens and invigorates Marxist theory and brings it into action. There's sort of two elements to Marxism. When I think about it, there's the economic theory, the theory of value, right? And then there's the political theory and economic action and political action. And sometimes, I mean, again, I'm thinking about communist China. Sometimes the economic part is, you know, people say, well, it's not communism anymore for the economic part, but there's still the, can you kind of break that down for me a little bit?

Absolutely. So Marx, first and foremost, he is writing Das Kapital as a critique of economics. Like the subtitle is, it's a critique of political economy. He is trying to make his impact as a scholar by saying, here are how the economists have it wrong, here's my new vision of it that I've reimagined, here's my corrective to it, and I'm going to show you the way. But there's a problem with that. So Marx writes Das Kapital, it's published, the first volume in 1867, and it's premised around something known as the labor theory of value. This is an old classical way of looking at, like, how does a good get value instilled in it? And the old answer was, well,

labor performed improves raw materials into a finished product, and that increases the value of it, which kind of seems intuitive, but it doesn't always work. There are well-known paradoxes and contradictions, because labor theory of value doesn't account for differences in taste and preference. So if I prefer to have a green car, you prefer to have a red car. I mean, who's right? Which car is more valuable? It all comes down to my subjective taste versus yours. There are all sorts of situations where the labor theory of value doesn't work. So this had been a problem economists were dealing with. Marx adopts the labor theory of value, and he says we can take it one step further. We know that the factory workers are not paid the full amount that their goods are selling for. And what he says is basically it's the owners of the factory,

the owners of capital, are taking the difference between the wage that they give to the worker and what they bring in from selling the product. And he says, that's the surplus value. If you take the difference between the price and then basically what the laborer is paid. He says, that's the surplus value. And because the laborer, the proletarians, don't have access to the surplus value, they're exploited and they're going to realize they're exploited and eventually they're going to realize they're exploited, and eventually they're going to rise up in revolution. So that's the mechanism, the basic building blocks of the Marxist system. He publishes this in 1867, but it turns out his whole theory of value is wrong.

Economists figured out it's not the labor performed that instills value into something, it's subjective preferences exercised at the margin of an economic decision. It's the next unit that I buy. It's, you know, the classic example, a bottle of water is worth a lot more in the desert than it is on the streets of Washington, D.C. And the opposite's true. A diamond is worth a lot more in the streets of Washington, D.C. than it is in the desert. And it's this circumstance, it's this occasion that will tell you which one you are going to exchange for the other. If you had a bag of diamonds in the desert, it's basically worthless to you if you have no water. So you'd be willing to give that for water. So that's the classic paradox. What economists do is they figure out that if value comes from subjective preferences exercised at the margin, we actually have

a functional price system we can derive from this. So in 1871, just four years after Marx writes his magnum opus, Das Kapital, there are a pair of different economists that simultaneously solve the problem of value. This is Karl Menger in Austria, William Stanley Jevons in Great Britain. They just kind of happen upon it simultaneously, although they're studying the same things. And within four years of Marx's book being published, it's obsolete. The error is there. The fundamental error at the beginning of his text is present. And economists just generally have moved on by the time that... That in itself is astonishing because, I mean, I suspect the Communist Manifesto has read more than Das Kapital, but Das Kapital has read a lot.

It is. It's the second most common of Marx's books that's read today. The Manifesto, it's a short, easy, relatively accessible book. So of course, it's assigned a lot. But the core, the Bible of Marxism is Das Kapital. And both of them have similar theories. One is a much more truncated version of the other. Das Kapital also adds things that Marx has picked up in the decades in between when they're written. But this book, you know, and he publishes it in 1867, and it basically goes unnoticed. Marx himself, I think famously quipped, he said, he spent more money on cigars that he smoked while writing it than he ever earned from Das Kapital.

So he knows that the book's basically a failure. And yet it has this new life breathed into it generations later by Lenin. But back to the economics profession, they do read it, they consider it. So in the 1880s and 1890s, there are several commentaries by leading economists of the era, and they read Das Kapital, and they conclude that the logic in it is circular. The theory of value is wrong. It has internal contradictions that Marx cannot solve, and as a result of it, it's basically a text that we should set aside as an erroneous economic doctrine. And this isn't just people on the free market side. So John Maynard Keynes, the major figure of progressive economics of the 20th century, reads Das Kapital and he's asked his opinion of it. And he says, quote, it's an obsolete textbook of no interest to the modern world.

Astonishing. Yeah. So we've talked about the sort of the economic aspect of Marxism, but what about, so what is this? See, why am I talking about this right now? Because I've often been told by people that, you know, in a place where we're no longer doing economic Marxism, which has been shown to fail spectacularly every time it's been applied, that's not communism anymore. Right. But I beg to differ. What do you think? Well, the two are intertwined. And if you read Marx, he views them as intertwined. It's his economic theory that leads to the doctrine of surplus value, that leads to this condition of exploitation that causes the workers to rise up.

And Lenin realizes this. In fact, like prior to Lenin coming along, there was a big debate in the Marxist fringes. You know, there are Marxist activists, but they're in the really extreme periphery of the far left. And the big question before them is, do we pursue the revolutionary version of Marx, or do we try to get labor reforms through democratic socialism in a parliament? And there's a big divide between them about who has the right strategy. Lenin emerges victorious out of that because he executes on the revolution. But the idea here is that the economic conditions breed the political conditions that instigate the revolution. Now, if you say, well, the economics are wrong,

they're obsolete, theory of value is an error, yet we're going to proceed with revolutionary Marxism anyway, effectively what you get is a Marxist state will be established through a coup d'etat or through one of these other violent events, and then they'll just default and go right back to the economic planning as if it had never been critiqued. And so that has happened, of course, a number of times. We could go into the details of that. But then in some cases, for example, Communist China looked at the Soviet Union and thought to themselves, hmm, the way they did their economics probably isn't a really good idea. Let's do something different. So they modify. Is that still communism?

I think there are elements of it because you do have state ownership and state control over major contributors to the economy. Right., they do have enough sense that they loosen it up, that there's a de facto capitalistic element at play in many aspects of the Chinese economy. But at any moment, on any day, you could have the leadership of the Communist Party clicks their fingers, and suddenly what was operating as a private firm is now a state asset. Or someone else, or an outside firm that's invested. Exactly. They're like standing on the edge of a knife there that that could happen at any moment.

Now, they don't do it all that often because they recognize that the economic ruination that comes from central planning. I mean, you go back to the Soviet Union's experience, it is a succession of disasters and attempting to centrally plan an economy. And they really were trying to act on the doctrines of Karl Marx. Now, Marx has an internal contradiction in them. This was recognized very early on by economists. They noted that labor is both a priced input and an output. So how do you calculate the fair value of labor if they're simultaneously dependent on each other? It's a contributor to production, but it's also a product itself. And it turns out it's mathematically impossible. So to centrally plan an economy,

and this is known, I think it was conclusively proven by 1906 by a fairly sympathetic economist to Marx, Wladyslaw Borkowitz, investigates and he tries to do all these mathematical proofs and he comes up and says, you know, basically it can't be done, I'm going to offer an alternative solution to how do you transform labor as an input to a price output. And he can't do it. There are other fundamental contradictions when you try to centrally plan an economy, the information signals are all skewed because you obliterate pricing. Pricing conveys signals both to the buyers and the sellers. What's in popular demand?

What good do people want? It also gives signals to the various stages of production in the factory, like how do I get my inputs? Where do I source my raw materials? You need prices to do that functionally. And if you take it away and try to centrally plan it from a bureaucrat or an edict from above, they need to know so much information to execute on that, it becomes physically impossible. Well, and what you're telling me, I mean, what is becoming apparent to me as you're discussing all this is that there's a necessary aspect of coercion in order to affect this. It's the backstop, is the coercive power of the state. And Marxist and communist regimes, a lot of them, they initially start as a very top-down.

It says, we're going to centrally plan the economy, and we're going to do it right this time. Soviet Union has their five-year plans to industrialize. Malice China, the Great Leap Forward, it's all this very top-down economic organization. Castro tried it. Hugo Chavez tried it in Venezuela. Pol Pot tries it in Cambodia. It's just a succession of regimes and they all start from the very top down and they go basically one of two directions. Unfortunately, the first direction is severe extreme political repression. They find out that the plan is not working, so they crack down in violent physical ways. This is how you get the Ukrainian famine. This is how you get the Maoist suppression

and cultural revolution. This is how you get the killing fields of Cambodia. People are not going along with the plan. Therefore, what do we do? We eliminate the people. We eliminate the people that are obstacles. And then the second route is that they'll liberalize on the market side while retaining the political system. And that's what China figured out after the failures of the Maoist era. So we can liberalize the economy and actually kind of mimic essentially what happens in a Western capitalistic system, but we still maintain the political control.

And then at any moment, we can snatch it back. And knowing what we know here at Epoch Times about the Chinese economy, it's still very fraught. Right. I guess that would be the way to put it, but in perhaps a way more similar to other systems which are also interested in more centralized planning of various sorts. You can never trust the data of a centrally planned regime. This was true of the Soviet Union. They always had these officially published figures that said, well, we are industrializing at such a pace that we're going to be the largest economy in the world. And unfortunately, some very naive economists in the 20th century, they'd see this.

And they published textbooks that showed the Soviet economy projected to overtake the United States. But there was an economist in the 1950s by the name of Warren Nutter, and he started studying some of the production data and looking at some of the unofficial figures. And he actually went and did a tour of the Soviet Union. And he comes back and he says, they're lying about their stats for political reasons. And really, the Soviet economy is much weaker. Well, and the thing is, you know, this is the thing. It's all about, you know, incentive structures, right? This is one of my lessons

of, again, the last decade. Look at the incentive structures. You'll figure a lot out, right? And I mean, if you have a leader that has absolute power or a politburo or a party, you know, your incentive for you to deliver

what they're demanding is very high. Exactly. Right? Whether or not it's true is're demanding is very high. Exactly. Whether or not it's true is kind of a secondary question. Yeah. So Stalin did that with the Soviet censuses. He needed to show certain census numbers were hit to prove the Soviet state was growing, but he also had this problem of this massive famine he created

where millions of people died. And the census numbers don't add up. So what does he do? He cancels the census in 1937 and says, well, you've got to run it again and give me the right numbers because I need to show essentially what I promised to show. So it's always that, the political incentive there. If you're in a functional free market capitalist system, you don't need to lie about the numbers because the evidence is all around you. If you're in a command and control top-down state and the actual numbers are not

matching your political projection, the incentive is there to deceive. Right. And then there's the in-between state. Yeah. Right. The in-between state of things where there's a bit of truth and a bit of lie. Exactly. Exactly. Fascinating. Okay. Well, let's get to your study. Yeah. All right.

So what did you do? Yeah. So philosophers and historians had written for years about this question. What did Lenin do to Marx's reputation? We all know 1917 is a big event. And then I also knew from these accounts that like when Marx dies in 1883, barely anyone shows up at his funeral. The economics profession considers him and rejects him right off the bat. So there was like a disconnect between this

reputation of Marx as this major figure of the 19th century versus Marx being discredited by the economics profession and not really studied anymore until Lenin comes along. And I had seen this observation made across the political spectrum. Ludwig von Mises, the free market Austrian economist, writes about this. He says Marx was basically an obsolete figure in his era. It wasn't really going anywhere until Lenin came along. But also on the far left, Eric Hobsbawm, a British historian, probably the most prominent Marxist historian of the late 20th century, he studies the printing records of Das Kapital and all these books,

and he finds out something really interesting that kind of confounds him at first, but then he admits it. He looks and says, all these Marxist groups in the 1880s, 1890s, early 1900s that claimed to be followers of Marx really didn't put many copies of Marx into print. They weren't circulating it among the masses. They studied Marx as a very small group of intellectual elites, but none of the social democratic labor movements they claimed to represent were familiar with Marx in any intimate way. And Hobsbawm says it's the treasury of the Russian state that Lenin puts to work to start

disseminating and popularizing Marx in 1917 onward. So what I did, I said, well, this observation's been made. We can actually empirically test this. We can look at the number of times Marx's name is cited, both before and after the Russian Revolution, and see if there's a trend. And I didn't know what the data was going to show. I just started to look around. It actually originated, interestingly enough, I was on like a Facebook chat with my co-author

on the study, Michael McCovey, who's another economist at Northwood in Michigan. And we were bouncing around data ideas, and I was like, I think I see a trend here. And I show it to him, and he says, I see the same trend. So what I did is I started to map the number of times Karl Marx's name appears in the Google Books database. So Google has this massive program where they go around to university libraries and they scan books and they have ocular text recognition.

So you actually get the text of the books entered into this massive database. And they release this product periodically called the Ngram, which you can go on their website and you can search for any phrase or name or group of words and see how many times it appears

in a given year relative to the number of books that are in the database. So you can do that with Karl Marx's name. So I search Karl Marx's name, and he's cited, but very infrequently. He's just kind of like very slowly drifting along from around the time of his death until 1916. And then in 1917, when Lenin sees his power, Marx's citations go from a very slow, steady, relatively low figure, they skyrocket. In the course of a few years, they basically triple. And then it's been off to the moon ever since then. So what that tells me that there's an empirical indicator here that shows Lenin does, in fact, popularize Marx, boosts him from kind of a peripheral figure that was known maybe among

intellectuals, known and disregarded by economists, known among the socialistic stream on the political left. And now suddenly Marx is cited everywhere. He's in the mainstream. So I start studying, okay, well, I need a counterfactual. I've got the evidence that shows Marx's citations spike after Lenin. But it could be everyone. But it could be everyone, yeah. So what I did, and Michael and I put together a database of 225 other prominent and not so prominent figures from the 19th century. Basically ancient world all the way up to Marxist time because we want to get contemporaries and people that preceded Marx. And this will include Aristotle and Plato and Socrates. It also includes Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith, so these are 18th and 19th century

economists that are contemporaries. It includes some very obscure socialists, like the competitors of Marxist socialist world are Johann Karl Rodbertus, who's another surplus value theorist. It's several other contemporaries that Marx jousted with. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is like an anarcho-socialist out of France. La Salle, who's a democratic socialist contemporary in Prussia. These are all people in the 19th century that are pretty obscure today, but in Marx's time, at least among the socialist world, they were the competitors for the far left. So we put them all into this database and run a probabilistic algorithm

computer software. So it's basically a giant econometric model. And what it does is it fits all of the other authors. It selects from the other authors. It says, who tracks Marx the closest prior to 1917? And I'm able to develop basically a counterfactual, like an artificial Marx that matches the real Marx up until 1917. And once I've got that, you can project forward and say, well, what would have happened had the Russian Revolution never occurred to Marx's citations? And projecting forward, you use these synthetic counterfactuals, and they also have a new trend. And what we show in the main graph is Marx's actual citations skyrocket, whereas the counterfactual based on people that he was matching before 1917

continues at this relatively low level for decades and decades out. You start to get the divergence. So there we have the proof. It's Lenin, in fact, that elevates Marx and puts him on top. And this continues. And so they're presumably out of these 225-odd intellectuals they grab. There's a few people that have some bumps for other reasons along the way. But largely it's this slow growth, and meanwhile the hockey stick happens. Yeah, so the hockey stick and marks, slow growth for everyone else that is the donor, the components of our counterfactual.

I mean, absolutely fascinating. So you've actually kind of put to bed this. It answered the longstanding intellectual question that had been posed by everyone from Mises on the free market end to Eric Hobsbawm, the Marxist historian, and dozens of people in between. You know, W.E.B. Du Bois, the African American activist who later becomes a Marxist at the end of his life, he asks the same question. He says, I think Lenin was what actually boosted Marx. And then you have people on the free market end that ask the same question. Thomas Sowell wrote an intellectual biography of Marx and he kind of scratches his head and he says, well, Marx seemed to die in obscurity and seemed to be like fading away.

And then suddenly he's everywhere. So it's all the way across the political spectrum this question has been asked. Now we have empirical evidence of it. And not just in it. So the main test that I did is English. So it's the most dominant academic text, language that's used in books and everything. But I get the question, is the same thing happening in other countries and other languages? Like Russian, for example. Yeah.

Right. So unfortunately, the Russian databases are not thorough enough to fully do the tests that we need, but German is. And Marx wrote in German, so it's a natural one to look at. And Michael and I decided, okay, we're going to repeat this. We scraped all the data for these different authors in first Google Books' German version, and then we looked at newspaper databases to see as well, are the daily newspapers mentioning Marx at all? And we found basically the same pattern. He's a relatively low level until 1916, then in 1917 with the Russian Revolution, he just takes off. But there's another twist in Germany.

Hitler comes into power in 1933 and suppresses Marxist doctrine. Among many other people that he targeted as his opposition, the Marxists were in the opposition. So he orders decrees like Marxist books are banned, basically. And that citation, the hockey stick in Germany that had started a decade earlier, a little over a decade earlier, plummets and nosedives. It goes back down and almost hits the counterfactual until 1946. What happens in 1946? The Soviet Union takes over East Germany. They establish a Marxist state. then you get a second hockey stick. So it's time and time again we're proving that Marx's reputation in book references, in newspapers, in print material is extremely closely tied to a succession of political events. They're making them go up, down, and up again. Well, and that's very interesting because, you know, the question is, of course, why, right? And I think running it in Germany with the results that you got suggests more and more to me that it is the propaganda.

Absolutely. That is driving this, not just people's astonishment and wonder at the success or something like that. They're not reading Marx and concluding, oh, this guy has it right, here's our manual on how to run the world. Although socialists like to present themselves as thinking of that. What they're doing is they're seeing Marxist regimes taking control of governments and declaring Marxist

the official doctrine of the state, therefore everybody must read Marx. Well, and there's always this other element. There's this kind of internationalist element always, right? Because that is part of the political aspect. Absolutely. And so it's sort of seeding the glory of the success of the system, irrespective of the on-the-ground reality. And Lenin recognized that. Lenin, after he seizes control and wins in Russia, the next thing he does is, how do we export this system to the rest of the world? So he subsidizes the translation of Marx's texts into all sorts of other languages.

And he embarks on like a major publishing program funded by the Soviet government. They set up publishing houses to take unpublished manuscripts out of Marx and put them into print, to take existing manuscripts and put them into every language, and to send them to the corners of the Earth. Fascinating. I mean, there's a, I guess, success of central planning, I suppose, right? In a weird way. Yeah. Well, and so you've also looked at using a similar model.

Yeah. You've done some other studies, actually, that are kind of, I guess, sort of follow-ups to this. Exactly, exactly. Yeah. So I think we've got a proof of concept here that we can find in Marx's citation when he peaks and when he declines and when he peaks again. And there's a very obvious one that

happens between 1989 and 1991. That's the fall of the Berlin Wall to the fall of the Soviet Union. Well, intuitively, we'd expect that Marx is somewhat discredited by that. And for a brief period, he was. So his citations drop off after the fall of communism. And that was the message of the era, the mid-1990s, is, well, Marx has been defeated by reality, discredited. Capitalism won, Marxism lost, therefore maybe we study him as a historical figure, but he's no longer the striving thing. Unfortunately, he's since rebounded. One of the other things I start to look at, well, how were other Marxist thinkers received? Because they, you know,

after Lenin establishes Marx, Lenin himself is now a figure. And there are successive generations of Marxist philosophers. So one of the ones that I have started to dig into pretty intensely is the Western Marxist Frankfurt School. This is a group of followers of Marx. They set up originally at the University of Frankfurt in Germany. They're displaced in the Nazi era and they relocate to the United States in 1933. But it's a group. Max Horkheimer, these are fairly obscure names, but bear with me. Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse are probably the three biggest figures of the original Frankfurt School generation. And what they are, they're Marxist theorists that have been kind of scratching their heads,

saying, well, Marx promised the revolution, but for some reason the revolution never happens. It's actually that they realize that it's the vanguard, the Lenin-type figures that staged the revolution, not the proletarian uprising. So they're asking all these questions and trying to figure out, well, what's going on here? Why isn't Marxist predicted ascendance of socialism happening the way Marx claimed? And, you know, part of the answers that they come up with is basically that Marxism has now encountered a theoretical underpending from the other side that exists to prop up the existing power distribution. So Frankfurt School Marxism is also referred to as critical theory.

Critical theory juxtaposes itself against traditional theory. And it says that, you know, we look around and we see traditional theory or all these supposedly objective philosophical intellectuals that say they're describing the world. But what they're really doing is they're upholding the power of the owners of capital. They're coming up with almost like mythologies to protect capitalism. And the critical theorist's role is to interrogate that and emancipate humanity from like this this uh imposed uh epistemic order the scientific order of looking at the world that protects the uh oppressor slash bourgeoisie class yeah so uh so they're they're trying to awaken uh a liberation in the way that that people are educated and study the world.

You get all these derivatives that are critical theory breeds critical race theory and critical pedagogy. And all of these academic terms that we hear today on the far left are rooted in this line of thinking that goes back to the 1920s with Max Horkheimer. So what happens is that they set themselves up with including a partnership in publishing some things with the Soviet government. So they're one of the infused beneficiaries of Lenin's cash, although they get money from elsewhere as well. And they set up an institute to study theoretical Marxism. They have an in-house journal and publishing press where they write hundreds of papers exploring every little peripheral nuance of Karl Marx and theories on how to go forward. But originally the Frankfurt School basically goes unnoticed, just like Marx himself, for

decades. There's a famous philosopher of science, Karl Popper, from the UK, who was asked about what is the Frankfurt School in an interview by the BBC, I think it was in the late 60s or so. And he says, well, I first heard of them back in the 20s and 30s, and I was curious. I looked at their work, and I didn't think it had any merit, so I just forgot about them. But what happens with the Frankfurt School, you see their citations, they're basically nothing throughout the 20s, 30s, 40s, and into the 1950s. And then suddenly they're picked up as the heroes of the radical left campus protest movements in the late 1960s. Herbert Marcuse's student, Angela Davis, is one of the figureheads of that whole era.

She's still around. And she's still around. So there's this whole chain of these activist Marxist academic types that come out of this tradition in the late 1960s, and suddenly Marcuse and Horkheimer and Adorno, these other critical theory figures from the Frankfurt School that had been basically ignored by their disciplines or considered very peripheral in their fields suddenly start to skyrocket. And next thing you know, their citation patterns are matching someone like Karl Popper or Isaiah Berlin,

all these major figures of political theory by the end of the century. And you can track this all the way up into the present day, Frankfurt School Marxist Critical Theory basically revived yet another wave of intellectual Marxism that's continued to the present. So their citations go from nothing, nothing, nothing. The campus protests take off. Then they have a hockey stick. Fascinating.

So you're basically saying those campus protests in the 60s were a kind of revolution. Of sorts, like an intellectual version of one. Right. And you look at some of the demands of them, they were all about demands to change the composition of the faculty, to change the curriculum, i.e. create jobs for themselves, appoint them. There was also an infusion in the way that the role of the university, you know, traditionally we think of universities, they teach the next generation the skills and knowledge to become successful practitioners. This is why we invest in

universities. We want scientific knowledge to come out of it. We want a more educated public. That's the traditional pedagogy. Well, critical pedagogy says, no, you actually have to teach students to be activists. Teach them to do things outside of the classroom, not focus on their studies, but figure out ways to change the world. And a proper instruction in a critical pedagogy format basically instills a student not to get A's on their papers and turn in scholarly term papers and exams and everything. It instills them to pick up protest posters and go out and occupy the campus quad and make political demands, which is something that we see ongoing right now. Well, and how does the civil rights movement fit into this time period? Yes, well, it's actually the Civil Rights Movement precedes it. The March on Washington is the early 1960s.

Brown versus Board is 1954. The Civil Rights Movement had been in full swing for a decade or more before all of these figures come along. So I kind of see them as arriving on the tail end of it and latching on to it and other political movements. So there's also the protests against the Vietnam War. And they're not the instigators of this, but they latch on to it. We see some of the same pattern today. You know, there's the big debate over Gaza versus Israel and the war that's going on over now. A lot of the people that have latched

on to the protest movement for it have very little interest or stake in either side of that war, but they view the Palestinian cause as something that can be co-opted to like a Marxist revolution, a post-colonial revolution. So this is a recurring theme that was always true, even back in Karl Marx's own lifespan. He looked around the world and saw every time there's a political disruption or upheaval, he's like, how can I latch myself onto that? This is where the Communist Manifesto comes from in 1848. There are political revolutions happening on the European continent. Marx sees them and he basically confers with Frederick Engels, well, we need to write a document that summarizes our cause for this and rush it into print. Well, it turns out they're fairly slow at getting it done, so it only arrives at the tail end of the revolution, and it kind of fades into memory.

And that's where we start learning about the specter of communism. Exactly. That is exactly it. every successive event. So Marx sees the American Civil War playing out and he's like, aha, maybe I can use this to turn it into a proletarian revolutionary cause. So he writes all these articles about the American Civil War and how it's really a labor upheaval to overturn slavery. And he, you know, Marx is an anti-slavery guy, but it's not first and foremost his cause. And he's not a major figure of abolition. And Marx is over in London and he starts writing about it. He says, oh, well, maybe this is the moment now. My revolution is finally happening. So he writes an essay basically diagnosing what's going on in the Paris Commune and morphs it to fit his own ideology. And then when it fails,

it's like, well, see, they didn't follow my advice enough. So his theories are never falsifiable. When the revolution fails, it's never because something was wrong with the way that Marx diagnosed it. It's some outside capitalist party that's intruded and prevented it from playing its natural course. So this is kind of the mythology that's carried forward. And what you see today, and what you see from the 1960s, the presidents, like people like frankfurt school they're latching on to existing other political movements civil rights movement being one you go to the origins of the civil rights movement and especially the phase after brown versus board in the 1950s and 60s read the naacp's literature there. They are vehemently anti-communist. They wanted nothing to do with this Soviet specter that was claiming to act on their behalf, or they wanted nothing to do with

the Frankfurt School types that were saying, well, this is a Marxist paradigm that we can interpret this through. They were like, no, we're showing we are good patriotic Americans. We recognize the threat of the Soviet Union and other communist countries abroad. So the NAACP puts out pamphlets saying that the cause of civil rights is a cause of freedom, basically. Which is kind of obvious. Which it is. Right. Fascinating. You know, and I want to add, I'm going to have to have you back sometime to talk about, you know, one of your areas of specialization, now that you've mentioned it, is, of course, this, you know, economic realities of slavery. And it's absolutely not what we've been taught to believe either, is it? Right, right.

So, I mean, a whole other topic for another day, but I will definitely have to have you back about that. Yeah, I'd love to, yeah. Well, I mean, I'll give people a hint, right? It was, slavery was devastating economically. That's your argument, basically. Absolutely. Especially if you consider the people themselves that are the victims of slavery. Consider the conditions of the slaves.

They're an absolute destitution and poverty and oppression. They're economic actors, though. And they're impoverished by this institution by basically being forced into a form of labor that's not terribly productive. It's very brutal. It's like serfdom. It's done under the threat of violence, under whips and chains. That basically denies them of their own economic agency. And what it means is there's a whole sizable segment of the population that's excluded from economic

betterment. And if you include that in the calculation, the estimation of slavery, slavery makes a very small number of wealthy plantation owners extravagantly rich. But everybody else is in terrible shape. The slaves certainly. Poor non-slave-owning whites are also economically stagnated because of the path dependency of the slave economy. If their only focus is producing rice, cotton, and sugar, no industry develops, so there's no other opportunities for jobs. And you see this. It's why the southeastern United States lags economically behind the rest of the country for almost a century after slavery is abolished.

Well, and so, you know, it's interesting, again, as you say this, Phil, it's so obvious that a system, sort of a, you know, frankly, an evil system like this would beget this kind of a reality for people, and not just, not just the slaves themselves. It's just, it's horrific, but we're kind of, again, we're kind of, we've been taught mythologies around these things that make us, well, we'll definitely have you back to talk about this sometime. I mean, this has been an absolutely wonderful discussion. Any final thoughts as we finish? I think one of the major implications here, so Marx is obviously, he's a very intelligent individual. I think he's

completely wrong on a lot of his ideas. And that explains why he is discredited by economists very early on, why they reject his theories and not just dismissing them. They consider them and they dissect them and say, here are the errors, here are the problems. This is a no-go. And yet here we are today. Marx is more ascendant than ever academically. but it's not in the economics departments.

Economists generally recognize this is an erroneous theory that's something we study as a historical event, not as a viable way to understand the economy today. But Marx has moved over into the English department and the philosophy department and the sociology department, where they're basically teaching Fah economics in the Marxian sense outside of their zones of expertise and shoehorning them into disciplines like literature and philosophy and anthropology and music and culture and art. So that's really where the stuff has kind of taken roost. But they've done so in a way that's invented their own myth, their own narrative about themselves.

Because if you ask almost any academic Marxist today, even if they're the most diehard, we must study Das Kapital, we must use this as the framework to interpret everything, they will say, but we're not Soviets. We're not connected to any of these horrible regimes of the 20th century. We don't believe in Leninism. We don't believe in Maoism, Pol Pot. They want to run away from that legacy as far as they can, as they should, because it's a horrific tens of millions of body counts, genocides, economic ruination. Everything that we know about 20th century communism is a

disaster. So they want to separate themselves from that legacy and they do like a kind of an intellectual turn of phrase. They'll say, well that wasn't true Marxism or that wasn't true communism and we've all heard this. But what my studies and works on this question basically show is Karl Marx himself would not be the figure that he is today had it not been for this propagandizing from Lenin and the Soviet Union. So whether modern-day Marxists like it or not, they have an intellectual debt to the fact that Lenin elevated this guy and not only squeezed out

other competing socialist traditions, but made Karl Marx like the default thinker on the political left that everyone else rallies around. So, you know, we imagine an alternative 20th century, Lenin loses or Lenin never stages his coup. Well, what happens? There are probably still socialists and Marx is probably one of them. But there are dozens of competing traditions, some violent, some nonviolent. They probably don't

coalesce around a single figure or ideology, and they certainly don't become this recurring pattern of staging violent coups to take over countries. Instead, you get a very different intellectual landscape, and some of these other traditions that are crowded out, even on the far left, by Marx probably would have survived and continued. We'd be talking about Rodbertian socialism or Lasallian socialism today as a school of thought academically. Instead, that's basically nowhere, and you have a much larger coalesced school of thought around Marx that, frankly, is standing on the shoulders of Lenin, whether they like it or not. So I'd say to people on the academic left, I'm not saying you approve of Lenin or you approve of the Soviet Union, but you do need

to recognize that as part of your legacy and ask the questions, interrogate yourself, why did this system you uphold and consider to be true, the Marxist system, keep yielding these humanitarian disasters and genocide. So that's what I would urge any academic follower of Marx today is to be introspective, to be interrogating themselves and asking why this figure that they've rallied around is such a big thing and what are some of the origins and legacies that made him that. Well, Philip Magnus, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

Thank you all for joining Philip Magnus and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.