How Marxism went from philosophy to cudgel

0:01NPR.

0:11This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Paddy 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, 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 and socialism. She's a Marxist. Everybody knows she's a Marxist.

0:48Her 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. This message comes from LinkedIn ads. One of the hardest parts about B2B marketing is reaching the right audience. That's why you need LinkedIn ads. You can target your buyers by job title, company, role, seniority, and skills.

1:23All the professionals you need to reach in one place. Get a$250 credit on your next campaign so you can try it yourself. Just go to linkedin.com slash nprpod. That's linkedin.com slash nprpod. Terms and conditions apply. Only on LinkedIn ads. This message comes from Schwab. Everyone has moments when they could have done better. Same goes for where you invest. Level up and invest smarter with Schwab. Get market insights, education, and human help when you need it. This message comes from Dell Technologies. Your new Dell PC with Intel Core Ultra helps you handle a lot when your holiday to-dos get to be a lot.

2:05Luckily, the Dell PC helps you get it all done. Get yours at dell.com slash holiday. 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. Karl 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 Kapital, which is a critique of capitalism, and the Communist Manifesto, which is, well, I guess speaks for itself.

2:52So 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. OK, 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, Marx said, the workers end up getting screwed. And Marx theorized that this conflict between workers and employers would eventually lead to the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a classless state where everything was owned in common.

3:43That's right. Commonism. Commonism. He had other ideas, too, that the idea of the family was a class-based concept and should be abolished. not sure about 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 labourers 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.

4:20And 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 seeded 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. Yeah, and in the Cold War that followed the Second World War, Marxism-inspired communist regimes with the enemy of the West, which was, of course, led by the U.S.

4:55One 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 or sense of violence. And fair enough, right? I mean, back then we were literally at war with the Marxists.

5:35But today, 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 communist, 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 and get angry about. In other words, when Speaker Johnson or President Trump cite Marxism, they're not talking about like actual Marxism, like banning private property or abolishing the family or even overthrowing capitalism.

6:16I 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.

6:58The 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, Paul, would you? I mean, I have a feeling they might object to that.

7:34Forcing 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.

8:16They 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, I 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.

8:55Johnson'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 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.

9:34It's 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, Onya Marx. This episode of The Indicator was produced by Cooper Katz-McKim and engineered by Robert Rodriguez.

10:22It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Kate Kincannon is our editor. The Indicator is a production of NPR.

10:45slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three-month five-gigabyte plan required, equivalent to$15 a month. New customer offer for first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. This message comes from Bombas. You need better socks and slippers and underwear because you should love what you wear every day. One purchased equals one donated. Go to bombus.com slash NPR and use code NPR for 20 % off. This message comes from Mint Mobile. Starting at$15 a month, make the switch at mintmobile.com slash switch. $45 upfront payment for three months.

11:27Five gigabyte plan equivalent to$15 a month. Taxes and fees extra. First three months only. See terms.