The Indicator from Planet Money - How Marxism went from philosophy to cudgel

Episode Date: October 28, 2025

Republican politicians like to use the term ‘Marxist’ to criticize Democrats. Lately, they’ve dubbed New York City mayoral candidate a ‘Marxist’ despite him identifying himself as a democratic socialist. Today on the show, we dig into what ‘Marxism, as an economic term,’ actually means.Related episodes: Socialism 101Even the facts are polarizedFor sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez. Music by Drop Electric. Find us: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Newsletter.  See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

NPR. This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Patty Hirsch. And I'm Adrian Ma. There's a word that Republican politicians have been tossing around recently that we want to talk about. Oh, hold on a second there, Adrian. Politics? We don't do politics here. This is an economics show.

Yeah, but this word is actually an economics term. And the term is Marxism. Oh, okay, right. Yeah. This is our latest episode in an ongoing series, economics terms corrupted by politics. My friends, this is not your father's Democratic Party. They are now full on to Marxism.

She's a Marxist. Everybody knows she's a Marxist. Her father's a Marxist. You know, part of me wants to say, let's take back Marxism, except, you know, I really don't want to do that. But I do want to set the record straight. So on today's show, we're going to find out exactly what this key economic term Marxism actually means. And why a lot of politicians are batting it about the place right now. That's coming up after the break.

So what is Marxism? Well, it's the political and economic theory of Karl Marx, German philosopher, big beard, wild hair, heavy drinker, even heavier smoker, died of bronchitis and was buried in Highgate Cemetery in London in the atheist's corner. Jennifer Nicol Victor is a professor of political science at George Mason University. Carl Marx was a 19th century philosopher who wrote a couple of very influential titles that a lot of political science students wind up reading sections of at least. The two biggies she's talking about are Das Capital, which is a critique of capitalism, and the Communist Manifesto, which is, well, I guess speaks for itself.

So together, these two works deliver one big message from Marx. He argues that left completely unregulated, untouched, capitalism winds up sort of exploiting the labor of workers. And so his argument is for workers to own the means of capital to avoid that exploitation. Okay, a quick explainer here. The means of capital or the means of production is everything needed to produce something, the land, the financing, the raw materials, the infrastructure. When employers own all that stuff and workers own only their own labor, Mark,

said the workers end up getting screwed. And Marx theorized that this conflict between workers and employers would eventually lead to the overthrow of capital. and the establishment of a classless state where everything was owned in common. That's right. Commonism. Commonism. He had other ideas, too, that the idea of the family was a class-based concept and should be abolished.

I'm not sure by that one. That no one should own private property. No thanks. And that all employers are exploitative. He might have something there. And he was a pretty radical dude, obviously, and pretty influential at the time. The world was going through the industrial. revolution. And there were a lot of people who worked as laborers in abusive situations. And so

his ideas gained a lot of traction and resonated with people in a way that gave some of those ideas some legs. And so that's part of why it was so popular early on. What would later be called Marxism was, of course, just a bunch of theories. But because life was so awful for workers back then, those theories ceded one of the most influential political and economic movements of all time. Communism. Marx inspired the leaders of revolutions, first in Russia and in China, then all over the world. And his writings continue to inspire left-wing movements today. And in the Cold War that followed the Second World War, Marxism inspired communist regimes were the enemy of the West, which was, of course, led by the U.S.

One communist on the faculty of one university is one communist too many. That was Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1952. And not long, after him, the biggest commie buster of them all, perhaps, Ronald Reagan. And the conspiracy that is communism is stronger, more determined than ever. When McCarthy and Reagan and others were talking about the threat of communism and so forth, I think they were mostly using it as a way to talk about a foreign global threat that evoked a potential threat of, or sense of violence. And fair enough, right?

I mean, back then, we were literally at war with the Marxists. But today, well, the Cold War is over. President Trump and President Putin of Russia appear to be pretty good pals. Marxism as a philosophy has been pretty much nailed into a lead-lined coffin and buried in an oceanic trench. Yeah, but Jennifer says the labels Marxist and Communists, they still have potency. We have a bunch of politicians who use Marxism as a way to evoke a sense of fear or a sense of the thing that we are not that you should be against, get angry about. In other words, when Speaker Johnson or President Trump cite Marxism,

they're not talking about actual Marxism, like banning private property or abolishing the family or even overthrowing capitalism. I mean, ask pretty much any democratic politician, and they'll tell you those are all terrible ideas. No, when Republican politicians squawk about Marxism, they're channeling something else entirely. Marxism has come to be equated with some idea of socialism,

some idea of government overreach. If you go back to the 1980s and you think about Ronald Reagan's sort of anti-government, small government rhetoric, it's that idea on steroids, where people have now taken that basic, more simple idea almost from Reagan and attached Marxism to it as a way of telling people, look, if you're with us, then you are against Marxism and Marx is evil. The genius of this is because Marxism has been around for so long that if you dig around enough, you can find trace elements of Marxist theory in pretty much any Western political policy. Yeah, I mean, take unions, for example, collective bargaining, motivated by the idea that there might just be an imbalance of power between workers and employers, and that maybe workers need more power in that relationship?

That's consistent with Marxism, but that itself is not what Marxism is wholly. Yeah, I mean, you wouldn't call police unions Marxist, for example, would you? I mean, I have a feeling they might object to that. Forcing the dichotomy of Marxist or not Marxist is just very challenging to do in the modern world because we never really have seen any examples of fully realized theoretical Marxism. Because it's so ill-defined in the public imagination

and so poorly understood, Marxism is almost a perfect verbal cudgel for politicians to wield. Politicians of all stripes use these tactics, like Democrats have linked GOP, candidates with QAnon, another inflammatory term. The best slurs are those that evoke emotion and are kind of vague and flexible. And that's what this is. It's evoking people's sense of emotion. They have an antagonistic trigger towards this term. You know, Adrian, it's hard for an econ nerd like me to hear any

economic term being twisted, manipulated, and misinterpreted for political gain. But, you know, Jennifer says, I really should be used to it by now because it's what happens. It is normal, natural, appropriate, in fact, for politicians to take complicated ideas and package them in ways that they think will resonate with voters. But what is new, she says, is the way in which the deliberate misinterpretation of this term Marxism is being weaponized by Speaker Johnson, for example. Johnson's use of it today is less about foreign threat and more about what Trump would call the threat from within. It's a domestic threat in which he is saying that our internal political opponents in the United States, the Democrats, they are the enemy.

Well, I mean, I guess if you can't find an enemy overseas, you've got to find one at home or 150 years in the past. I asked Jennifer, who had to read a whole whack of Karl Marx as she collected her three political science degrees, what she thinks Marx would make of all of this. I think Karl Marx himself, where he alive, would be astonished to see what's happened to his name, is not being used in good faith as a moniker of a particular idea.

It's being used as a way to stoke negative partisanship. It's being used as a way to help anybody who's listening to a Republican talking point say, I'm not sure if I'm fully a Republican yet, but I know I'm not that. So I guess I am now. So let me get this right. Do Republican politicians hate Marxism? Or do they really secretly like Marxism?

I mean, it's politics, so whatever works, right? I guess. Full Marx, Adrian. Full, full on Marx, Karl Marx. And his sister, Anya Marx. This episode of The Indicator was produced by Cooper Katz McKim, and engineered by Robert Rodriguez. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, Kate.

Canaan is our editor. The Indicator is a production of NPR.