Karl Marx and the Mythology Surrounding His Rise: Phillip Magness

[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] 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.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Phillip Magness, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Phillip Magness:
Thanks for having me.

Mr. Jekielek:
There is a mythology about Karl Marx tapping into the zeitgeist of the 19th century, coming up with this grand idea, and then suddenly it captures everyone’s imagination and takes off. You’ve done some really interesting work that suggests this is not the case. Please tell us about your work.

Mr. Magness:
Absolutely. Marx is well known as the founding figure of communist ideology. He inspired numerous movements across the 20th century, with the most famous being the Soviet Union. He is considered a major figure in the intellectual canon. With this comes a mythology that Marx had figured out something about the human condition in the 19th century. He had observed factory workers in poverty and extreme situations in the workplace in the late 19th century and supposedly identified a major problem with free market capitalist economic exchanges. He had allegedly diagnosed and predicted that a change, or major problems for humanity could arise.
There’s also the notion that Marx was a peer of other giants of the 19th century, such as John Stuart Mill, who actually lived in the same neighborhood as Marx in London for a period. Marx is presented as someone who was this peer interlocutor of both free market economists and other thinkers of his time, and emerged as a major figure on the academic and philosophical left in the 20th century solely based on the merits of his ideas. Yet the reality is Marx died in near obscurity, and only about a dozen people showed up at his funeral in 1883.
Looking back on that event, a Left-wing historian named Philip Foner writes a book on Marx’s funeral in the 20th century. He goes to research it, expecting there to be outpourings of grief from the laboring classes worldwide. In the introduction to his book, he mentions being surprised that he scoured newspapers and found that the obituary for Karl Marx was barely mentioned at all. Even socialist magazines did not pay much attention to who he was, so there’s a paradox here.
Marx is this highly-regarded intellectual who was a major figure of the late 19th century, yet at the same time, he was so obscure that his funeral basically went unnoticed. He is not really discussed or talked about in any mainstream substantive way for several decades after his death. I started investigating these claims. Other historians and philosophers had posited this idea before as well.

They said that 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. It is the Russian Revolution of 1917 where Lenin seized power by a forcible coup d’etat, overthrew the previous government at a time of political weakness, and he uses the resources of the Russian state to start propagandizing Karl Marx. That’s basically where we get the myth of Karl Marx.

Mr. Jekielek:
You came up with a very unique method of assessing his intellectual influence over time. There are a lot of mythologies around the Russian Revolution itself. Everyone knows Lenin was a central figure and no one debates that. But was it really the persecuted working classes that revolted? What actually happened there?

Mr. Magness:
Here is the fundamental contradiction of Marxist theory. Marx presents himself as a representative of the masses. His whole notion of history is defined by a contest over material resources, and that society has the haves and the have-nots. He looks around and says, “The have-nots are far more numerous than the haves. The proletariats outnumber the owners of capital. All we need to do is to get them to rise up and seize the means of production.”
This ushers in the new socialist age, basically. That’s Marxist theory 101. Yet, a small band of well-educated, probably upper middle-class intellectuals, people that come from non-proletarian backgrounds, found themselves interested in socialist and communist theorizing.

They stage revolutions, violent coup d’etats, often with very small groups, and that’s what happens in 1917. There are actually two Russian revolutions in 1917. One is early in the year at the tail end of World War I when the Russian state is destabilized. The Tsar abdicates, and he hands over control to a quasi-elected government that has all sorts of different factions, and it’s a very weak, unstable government.
Then Lenin arrives on the scene and comes into Russia. He was released and allowed to travel through the German territories as 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. This is a deliberate tactic to destabilize the Russian government.
Lenin successfully achieves that. He arrives with a small group of dedicated Marxists, and they take advantage of a moment of weakness to seize power with guns blazing. They quickly consolidate their power by imprisoning or executing their opposition, which triggers a civil war in Russia. Eventually, Lenin emerges as the victor. He propagates the myth that the population supports him, as Marxist theory predicted.
But in reality, it’s only a small group of intellectuals. The Marxists try to legitimize this by introducing the concept of vanguardism. They appoint themselves as the representatives of the proletariat, since the working class doesn’t rise up on their own. Marx himself advocates for the need of a communist party to lead the way when the people don’t take action themselves.
Mr. Jekielek:
Is vanguardism essentially Leninism?
Mr. Magness:
Yes, basically. It’s a more developed theory built on little certain lines of text and marks that he morphs into a formal theory of his own that surprisingly or unsurprisingly actually fits exactly what he wants to do.
Mr. Jekielek:
Xi Jinping is trying to codify his whole version of communist thought. It seems like every communist leader tries to do this. Please tell us about yourself. Why do you know so much about this, and differ so much from the mainstream view?

Mr. Magness:
I’m an economic historian by background, and I studied the 19th century and early 20th century, which is contemporary with these events. I also look at the history of economic thought. It is the interchange of ideas between how economists are interpreting the world around them and then the actual economic events that are unfolding. Take a figure like Marx. He is supposedly observing working class conditions in industrial revolution era 19th-century England.

He is 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 he is, but nonetheless, he’s a figure of that time. It always interested me how Marx was received? How was Marx understood in his own time? It turns out he was barely noticed at all.

Mr. Jekielek:
I have become aware of the true power of propaganda. You’re making the case that propaganda basically vaulted him into this position.

Mr. Magness:
It’s the political events surrounding the Russian Revolution and the mythology they constructed, and you can see this immediately. One of Lenin’s first actions after he comes to power in Russia is to start creating a state cult around the figure of Karl Marx. He commissions 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 who will carry it forward into the next century. He’s the person who enlivens and invigorates Marxist theory and brings it into action.

Mr. Jekielek:
There are sort of two elements to Marxism when I think about it. There’s the economic theory and then there’s the political theory and political action. With communist China, sometimes the economic part is not communist anymore. Can you break that down for us?

Mr. Magness:
Absolutely. First and foremost, Marx is writing “Das Kapital” as a critique of economics. The subtitle says that it’s a critique of political economy. He is trying to make his impact as a scholar by saying, “Here is how the economists have it wrong. Here’s my new vision of it that I’ve reimagined. Here’s my correction, and I’m going to show you the way.” But there’s a problem with that.

Marx writes “Das Kapital” and the first volume is published in 1867. It’s premised around something known as the labor theory of value. This is an old classical way of looking at how a good gets value instilled in it. The old answer was, “Labor performed improves raw materials into a finished product and that increases its value,” which kind of seems intuitive, but it doesn’t always work. There are well-known paradoxes and contradictions because the labor theory of value doesn’t account for differences in taste and preference.

If I prefer to have a green car and you prefer to have a red car, who is right? Which car is more valuable? It all comes down to my subjective taste vs. yours. There are all sorts of situations where the labor theory of value doesn’t work, and this had been a problem economists were dealing with.

But Marx adopts the labor theory of value, and he says we can take it one step further. We know that factory workers are not paid the full value of the goods they produce. The owners of the factory, the owners of the capital, are taking the difference between the worker’s wages and the income from selling the products. This difference is called surplus value.

Marx argues that because the workers, the proletarians, do not have access to this surplus value, they are being exploited. Eventually, they will realize this and rise up in revolution. This is the basic mechanism of the Marxist system. Marx published this theory in 1867, but it turns out that his theory of value is incorrect.

Economists have discovered that the value of something does not come from the labor performed, but rather from subjective preferences exercised in economic decisions. For example, a bottle of water is worth a lot more in the desert than on the streets of Washington, D.C., while a diamond is worth a lot more in Washington, D.C. than in the desert.

These subjective preferences determine what people are willing to exchange for one another. This insight, discovered by Carl Menger in Austria and William Stanley Jevons in Great Britain, led to the development of a functional price system. Within four years of Marx’s book being published, economists had already found his theory to be obsolete.

While “The Communist Manifesto” may be more widely read than “Das Kapital,” the latter remains the core text and Bible of Marxism. Both books present similar theories, with “Das Kapital” expanding on ideas that Marx gathered in the years between the two works. Despite being largely unnoticed upon its publication in 1867, Das Kapital has become the second most commonly read book by Marx.
Being shorter and more accessible, “The Communist Manifesto,” is frequently assigned in academic settings. Marx said that he spent more money on cigars that he smoked while writing it than he ever earned from Das Kapital. He knows that the book is basically a failure. Yet, it has this new life breathed into it generations later by Lenin.

Back to the economics profession, they do read the book and consider it. In the 1880s and 1890s, there were 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.

Mr. Jekielek:
I’ve often been told by people that economic Marxism, which has been shown to fail spectacularly every time it has been applied, is not really communism. What do you think?

Mr. Magness:
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. Lenin realizes this. In fact, like prior to Lenin coming along, there was a big debate in the Marxist fringes.

There are Marxist activists, but they’re in the really extreme periphery of the far-Left. 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?” There’s a big divide between them about who has the right strategy. Lenin emerges victorious out of that because he executes the revolution.

But the idea here is that the economic conditions breed the political conditions that instigate the revolution. Now, if you say, “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. Then they’ll just default and go right back to the economic planning as if it had never been critiqued.

Mr. Jekielek:
That has happened a number of times. But Communist China looked at the Soviet Union and thought to themselves, “The way they did their economics probably isn’t a really good idea. Let’s do something different. So they modified it. Is that still communism?

Mr. Magness:
There are elements of it because you do have state ownership and state control over major contributors to the economy. Now they do have enough sense to loosen it up, so there’s a de-facto capitalistic element at play in many aspects of the Chinese economy. But at any moment, on any day, the leadership of the Communist Party could click their fingers, and suddenly what was operating as a private firm is now a state asset.

Mr. Jekielek:
Or an outside firm that has invested in China.

Mr. Magness:
Exactly. They’re like standing on the edge of a knife there, that could happen at any moment. Now, they don’t do it all that often because they recognize the economic ruination that comes from central planning.
I mean, if you go back to the Soviet Union’s experience, it is a succession of disasters in attempting to centrally plan an economy. And they really were trying to act on the doctrines of Karl Marx.

Now, Marxist economic theory has an internal contradiction within it. This was recognized very early on by economists. They noted that labor is both a priced input and an output. How do you calculate the fair value of labor if it’s simultaneously dependent on itself? It’s a contributor to production, but it’s also a product itself. It turns out it’s mathematically impossible.

This is known and conclusively proven by 1906 by Wladyslaw Borkowitz, an economist fairly sympathetic to Marx. He investigates and tries to do all these mathematical proofs and he comes to the conclusion that it can’t be done. He offers an alternative solution to transforming labor as an input into a price output, but even 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 to both buyers and sellers. It indicates popular demand and what goods people want. It also provides signals to the various stages of production in the factory – where to source raw materials, how to obtain inputs. You need prices to do that effectively. And if you take it away and try to centrally plan it from a bureaucrat or an edict from above, they would need to know enormous amounts of information to execute on that, and it would be physically impossible.

Mr. Jekielek:
There is an aspect of coercion in order to affect this. The backstop is the coercive power of the state. Marxist and communist regimes initially start as very top-down and say, “We’re going to centrally plan the economy and we’re going to do it right this time.” The Soviet Union had their five-year plans to industrialize. Maoist China had the Great Leap Forward. It’s all this very top-down economic organization. Castro tried it. Hugo Chavez tried it in Venezuela. Pol Pot tried it in Cambodia. They all start from the very top down and they basically go in one of two directions.

Mr. Magness:
Unfortunately, the usual 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, so what do they do? They eliminate the people that are obstacles.

The second direction is that they’ll liberalize on the market side while retaining the political system. That’s what China figured out after the failures of the Maoist era. They realized they could liberalize the economy and essentially mimic what happens in a Western capitalist system and still maintain political control. But at any moment, they can snatch it back.

Mr. Jekielek:
The Chinese economy is still very fraught, similar to other systems.

Mr. Magness:
You can never trust the data out 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.” Unfortunately, some very naive economists in the 20th century saw this and 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, who started studying some of the production data and looking at some of the unofficial figures. He actually went on a tour of the Soviet Union. He comes back and says, “They’re lying about their stats for political reasons. The Soviet economy is really much weaker.”

Mr. Jekielek:
It’s all about incentive structures. If you have a leader that has absolute power, the incentive for you to deliver what they’re demanding is very high. Whether or not it’s true is kind of a secondary question.

Mr. Magness:
Stalin did that with the Soviet census. He needed to show that certain census numbers were accurate to prove that the Soviet state was growing. However, he faced a problem with the massive famine he created, resulting in millions of deaths. The census numbers didn’t add up, so he canceled the census in 1937 and demanded that it be run again to obtain the desired numbers. This was done to essentially show what he had promised to demonstrate. This illustrates the political incentive in a command and control top-down state, where the actual numbers may not align with the political projection, leading to a motivation to deceive.

Mr. Jekielek:
Then there’s the in-between state of things where it’s a mix of truth and lies. Let’s discuss your study. What did you do?

Mr. Magness:
For years, philosophers and historians have debated the question of “What did Lenin do to Marx’s reputation?” While we recognize that 1917 was a significant event, when Marx passed away in 1883, very few people attended his funeral. The economics profession promptly considered him and rejected him. Thus, there was a disconnect between Marx’s reputation as a major figure of the 19th century and his discreditment by the economics profession, resulting in limited study of his work until Lenin entered the scene. I have noticed this observation being made across the political spectrum.

Ludwig von Mises, the Austrian economist advocating for the free market, has written about this. He suggests that Marx was an outdated figure in his time and didn’t gain momentum until Lenin’s influence. On the far-Left, even Eric Hobsbawm, a prominent Marxist historian of the late 20th century, analyzed the printing records of “Das Kapital” and other related books. He discovered something perplexing at first but eventually admitted it.

Hobsbawm found that many Marxist groups in the 1880s, 1890s, and early 1900s, which claimed to follow Marx, didn’t publish many copies of his work. They didn’t circulate it among the masses, but rather studied Marx within a small group of intellectual elites. None of the social democratic labor movements these groups claimed to represent were intimately familiar with Marx. Hobsbawm highlights that it was Lenin who utilized the Russian state’s treasury to disseminate and popularize Marx’s ideas from 1917 onwards.

To test this observation empirically, I examined the frequency of citations of Marx’s name before and after the Russian Revolution. I wanted to determine if there was a trend in how often Marx was referenced. Prior to conducting the study, I was unsure of what the data would reveal. I just began to explore. Interestingly enough, it actually started when I was in a Facebook chat with my co-author on the study, Michael Makovi, who is another economist at Northwood University in Michigan.

We were exchanging ideas about data and I noticed a possible trend. I showed it to him and he confirmed that he saw the same trend. I started mapping the frequency of Karl Marx’s name appearing in the Google Books database. Google has a massive program where they scan books from university libraries and use optical text recognition to create a large database. They periodically release a product called Ngram, which allows you to search for any phrase or name and see how many times it appears in a given year relative to the number of books in the database.

I searched for Karl Marx’s name and found that he is cited, but very infrequently. From the time of his death until 1916, his citations slowly increased. Then, in 1917, when Lenin gained power, Marxist citations experienced a dramatic increase. Within a few years, they tripled and have continued to rise ever since.

This empirical indicator suggests that Lenin did indeed popularize Marx and elevate him from a peripheral figure known primarily among intellectuals, disregarded by economists, and recognized only among the extremist socialist groups on the political Left. Suddenly, Marx became widely cited and entered the mainstream. As I delved deeper into my research, I needed a counterfactual. I had evidence showing that Marx’s citations spiked after Lenin’s rise to power.

Mr. Jekielek:
But it could be everyone.
Mr. Magness:
Yes, that’s why Michael and I compiled a database of 225 other influential and lesser-known figures from the 19th century. We included historical figures from the ancient world up to Marx’s time, as we wanted contemporaries and predecessors of Marx. This database encompassed names such as Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates, as well as economists like Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, and Adam Smith from the 18th and 19th centuries.

We also included some lesser-known socialists who were competitors in Marx’s socialist circles, such as Johann Karl Rodbertus, another proponent of surplus value theory. He was just one of several contemporaries with whom Marx had debates. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, a French anarcho-socialist, and LaSalle, a democratic socialist contemporary from Prussia, were also among these 19th-century figures who, though largely unknown today, were considered competitors in the far-Left socialist arena during Marx’s time. We entered all these names into a database and ran a probabilistic algorithm on computer software that is essentially a large econometric model. It selects from the authors and asks, “Who most closely follows Marx prior to 1917?”

I am able to create a counterfactual by constructing an artificial version of Marx that matches the real Marx up until 1917. Using this, I can then project forward and ask, “What would have happened to Marxist citations if the Russian Revolution had never occurred?” By projecting forward, these synthetic counterfactuals reveal a new trend. The main graph shows that Marx’s actual citations skyrocket, while the counterfactual based on people who matched him before 1917 remains at a relatively low level for several decades. This demonstrates the divergence and provides proof.
It is in fact Lenin who elevates Marx and propels him to the forefront, and this trend continues.

Mr. Jekielek:
Presumably, out of these 225 intellectuals, there are a few individuals who
experience bumps for other reasons along the way.

Mr. Magness:
Absolutely.

Mr. Jekielek:
But overall, there is a slow growth until the hockey stick effect occurs.

Mr. Magness:
Yes, it is the hockey stick effect for Marx, while the donor components of our counterfactual experience slow growth.

Mr. Jekielek:
You have effectively settled this question.

Mr. Magness:
The study has provided an answer to a long-standing intellectual question posed by figures ranging from Ludwig von Mises on the free market side to Eric Hobsbawm, the Marxist historian, to many others in between. W.E.B. Du Bois, the African-American activist who later became a Marxist, stated, “Lenin actually boosted Marx.” Similarly, individuals on the free market side have raised the same question. Thomas Sowell wrote an intellectual biography of Marx and pondered, “Marx seemed to be fading away and died in obscurity, and then suddenly he is everywhere.”

This question has been asked across the political spectrum. Now we have empirical evidence. The primary test I conducted was in English. It is the most widely used language in academic textbooks and other fields. However, I am frequently asked, “Is the same phenomenon occurring in other countries and languages, such as the Russian language?”

Unfortunately, the Russian databases are not comprehensive enough to conduct the necessary tests, but the German database is. Since Marx wrote in German, it was a logical choice for examination.

Michael and I decided to replicate this process. We collected data for various authors in Google’s German version and examined newspaper databases to determine if Marx was mentioned at all. We found similar patterns. Marx’s citations remained relatively low until 1916, and then after the Russian Revolution in 1917, they sharply increased.

But there’s another twist in Germany. Hitler came into power in 1933 and suppressed Marxist doctrine. The Marxists were in the opposition, among many other people that he targeted. He ordered decrees to ban Marxist books. 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 happened in 1946? The Soviet Union takes over East Germany. They establish a Marxist state. Then you get a second hockey stick. Time and time again we’re proving that Marx’s reputation in book references and newspapers and print material is extremely closely tied to a succession of political events. They’re making them go up, go down, and then go up again.

Mr. Jekielek:
The question is why. Running it in Germany with the results that you got suggests propaganda is driving this.

Mr. Magness:
They’re not reading Marx and concluding, “This guy has it right. Here’s our manual on how to run the world,” although socialists like to present themselves in that way. They’re seeing Marxist regimes taking control of governments and declaring Marxism the official doctrine of the state. Therefore, everybody must read Marx.

Mr. Jekielek:
There is also an internationalist element because that is part of the political aspect. It is seeding the glory of the system, irrespective of the on-the-ground reality.

Mr. Magness:
Lenin recognized that. After he seizes control in Russia, Lenin asks, “Do we export this system to the rest of the world?” He subsidizes the translation of Marx’s texts into many 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.

Mr. Jekielek:
Using a similar model, you’ve done some other studies that are follow-ups to this.

Mr. Magness:
Yes. 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. 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. Intuitively, we’d expect that Marx is somewhat discredited by that, and for a brief period, he was.

His citations drop off after the fall of communism, and that was the message of the era. By the mid-1990s, Marx has been defeated by reality and discredited. Capitalism won, Marxism lost. Therefore, maybe we should study him as a historical figure, but he’s no longer this driving thing.

Unfortunately, he has since rebounded. One of the other things I start to look at is how other Marxist thinkers were received. Because, you know, after Lenin establishes Marx, Lenin himself is now a figure. Then there are successive generations of Marxist philosophers. One of the ones that I have started to dig into intensely is the Western Marxist Frankfurt School.

This is a group of followers of Marx who originally set up at the University of Frankfurt in Germany. They were displaced during the Nazi era and relocated to the United States in 1933. The three biggest figures of the original Frankfurt School generation are Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse. These Marxist theorists have been questioning why Marx’s promised revolution never happened, realizing that it was the vanguard, the Lenin-type figures, who staged the revolution, not the proletarian uprising.

They are trying to understand why Marxism has not led to the predicted rise of socialism as Marx claimed. They argue that Marxism faces a theoretical obstacle from the existing power distribution. Frankfurt School Marxism is also known as critical theory, which opposes traditional theory and argues that traditional theorists uphold the power of the owners of capital, creating mythologies to protect capitalism. They also seek to awaken liberation in education and in the study of the world.

This line of thinking has given rise to critical race theory and critical pedagogy, among other academic terms used by the far-Left today. The Frankfurt School had a partnership with the Soviet government and received funding from Lenin’s cash, as well as other sources. They established the Frankfurt School institute to study theoretical Marxism, publishing hundreds of papers exploring various nuances of Karl Marx’s theories and ways to move forward.

However, the Frankfurt School remained relatively unnoticed for decades, similar to Marx himself. In an interview, the famous philosopher of science Karl Popper was asked about the definition of the Frankfurt School. In the late 60s, he said, “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 you can see the evolution of the Frankfurt School by checking their citations. Throughout the 20s, 30s, 40s, and into the 1950s, their citations were basically nonexistent. Then suddenly, in the late 1960s, they were picked up as the heroes of the radical Left campus protest movements. Herbert Marcuse’s student, Angela Davis, was one of the figureheads of that whole era, and she’s still around today.
There’s a whole chain of these activist, Marxist academic types that come out of this tradition in the late 1960s. Marcuse, Horkheimer, Adorno, and other critical theory figures from the Frankfurt School that had been basically ignored by their disciplines or considered very peripheral in their fields of study suddenly started to skyrocket. The 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.

You can track this all the way up into the present day. The Frankfurt School’s Marxist critical theory basically revived yet another wave of intellectual Marxism that has continued to the present. Their citations were basically nothing, the campus protests took off, and then they had a hockey stick spike.

Mr. Jekielek:
You’re saying those campus protests in the 60s were a kind of revolution.

Mr. Magness:
It was an intellectual version of one. They were all about demands to change the composition of the faculty and change the curriculum, which actually meant creating jobs for themselves and appointing themselves. Traditionally, when we think of universities, they teach the next generation the skills and knowledge to become successful citizens. This is why we invest in universities. We want scientific knowledge to come out of it. We want a more educated public. That is traditional pedagogy.

But critical pedagogy says, “No, you actually have to teach students to be activists. Teach them to do things outside of the classroom and not focus on their studies, but figure out ways to change the world.” Proper instruction in a critical pedagogy format basically trains students not to get A’s on their papers and not to turn in scholarly term papers, it trains them to pick up protest posters and go out and occupy the campus quad and make political demands, which is something that we see going on right now.

Mr. Jekielek:
How does the Civil Rights Movement fit into this time period?

Mr. Magness:
Essentially, the Civil Rights Movement precedes it. The March on Washington is in the early 1960s. The Brown v. The Board of Education court case happens in 1954. The Civil Rights Movement had been in full swing for a decade or more before all these events. This Leftist movement arrives on the tail end of it and latches on to it and other political movements. There are also protests against the Vietnam War. They’re not the instigators of this, but they latch on to these protests.

We see some of the same patterns today. There’s the big debate over Gaza vs. Israel and the war that’s going on 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.

This is a recurring theme that was true even back in Karl Marx’s own lifetime. He looked around the world and every time there’s a political disruption he says, “How can I latch myself onto that?” In 1848, this is where the Communist Manifesto comes from. There are political revolutions happening on the European continent. Marx sees them and he confers with Frederick Engels and says, “We need to write a document that summarizes this for our cause and rush it into print.” It turns out they were fairly slow at getting it done, so it only arrived at the tail end of the revolution, it faded into memory.

Mr. Jekielek:
That’s when we start seeing the specter of communism.

Mr. Magness:
That is exactly right. Marx saw the American Civil War playing out and said, “Maybe I can use this to turn it into a proletarian revolutionary cause.” He wrote all these articles about the American Civil War and how it’s really a labor upheaval to overturn slavery. Marx was an anti-slavery guy, but first and foremost, it was not his cause. He was not a major figure in the abolition movement.

Marx was over in London and he started writing about the Civil War. He says, “Maybe this is the moment now. My revolution is finally happening.” He writes an essay basically diagnosing what’s going on in the Paris Commune and morphs it to fit his own ideology. Then when it fails he says, “See, they didn’t follow my advice enough.” His theories are never falsifiable.

When the revolution fails, it’s never because something was wrong with the way that Marx diagnosed it. It is because some outside capitalist party intruded and prevented it from playing its natural course. This is kind of the mythology that’s carried forward. What you see from the 1960s to the present with people like the Frankfurt School, they’re latching onto other political movements, the civil rights movement being one.

If you go to the origins of the civil rights movement and especially the phase after Brown v. Board of Education in the 1950s and read the NAACP’s literature, they are vehemently anti-communist. They wanted nothing to do with this Soviet communist specter that was claiming to act on their behalf. They wanted nothing to do with it.

The Frankfurt School intellectuals who argued, “We can interpret this through a Marxist paradigm,” were also adamant about demonstrating their loyalty to the United States and their recognition of the threat posed by the Soviet Union and other communist countries abroad. The NAACP distributed pamphlets emphasizing that the civil rights movement was intrinsically linked to the cause of freedom.

Mr. Jekielek:
It is evident that we need to have you back to discuss one of your areas of expertise, the economic reality of slavery, which challenges commonly held beliefs. Your argument is that slavery had severe economic consequences.

Mr. Magness:
Absolutely. This is especially evident when you consider the impact on the individuals who were enslaved. They endured extreme poverty, destitution, and oppression. Although they were economic actors, they were trapped in an institution that hindered their productivity and resembled serfdom. They endured brutal conditions enforced through violence, whips, and chains, which deprived them of economic agency.

As a result, a significant portion of the population was excluded from economic progress. When factoring in their circumstances, slavery benefited only a small number of wealthy plantation owners while leaving everyone else in dire straits. The slaves themselves were undoubtedly the most affected, but even poor whites who did not own slaves faced economic stagnation due to their dependence on the slave economy.

The focus on staple crops like rice, cotton, and sugar prevented the development of other industries, thereby limiting job opportunities. This economic disparity explains why the southeastern United States lagged behind the rest of the country for nearly a century after slavery’s abolition.

Mr. Jekielek:
It is inevitable that such an evil system would inevitably lead to such dire consequences for people, not just the slaves themselves. We have been taught mythologies surrounding these issues. This has been an enlightening discussion. Any final thoughts as we finish up?

Mr. Magness:
Marx was undoubtedly an intelligent individual, but many of his ideas are fundamentally flawed. This is why economists discredited him early on and continue to reject his theories, not simply dismiss them. Economists meticulously scrutinize and critique his work, highlighting its errors and problems. Yet, the influence of Marx in academia has grown stronger than ever, though primarily outside of the economics department.
While economists recognize his theories as erroneous and study them as historical phenomena, Marxian ideas have pervaded the English, philosophy, and sociology departments, where they teach a distorted version of economics. This is not a viable approach to understanding the contemporary economy. expertise and shoehorning them into disciplines like literature, philosophy, anthropology, music, culture, and art. That’s really where this stuff has taken root.

But they’ve done so in a way that’s invented their own myth and their own narrative about themselves. Almost any diehard academic Marxist today will say that we must study “Das Kapital” and use this as the framework to interpret everything. But they will also say, “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 and Pol Pot.”

They want to run away from that legacy as far as they can, as they should, because it’s horrific—body counts in the tens of millions, genocides, and economic ruin. Everything that we know about 20th-century communism is a disaster. They want to separate themselves from that legacy, and they do like a kind of an intellectual turn of phrase. They will say, “That wasn’t true Marxism. That wasn’t true communism.” We’ve all heard them say this.

My studies on this question basically show that Karl Marx would not be the figure that he is today had it not been for this propagandizing from Lenin and the Soviet Union. Whether modern-day Marxists like it or not, they have an intellectual debt to the fact that Lenin elevated this guy. He not only squeezed out other competing socialist traditions but made Karl Marx the default thinker on the political Left that everyone now rallies around. If we imagine an alternative 20th century where Lenin never stages his coup, what happens?

There probably will still be socialists, and Marx is probably one of them. But there are dozens of competing traditions, some violent and some nonviolent. They probably don’t coalesce around a single figure or ideology, and it certainly doesn’t become this recurring pattern of staging violent coups to take over countries.

Instead, you get a very different intellectual landscape. Some of these other traditions that are crowded out by Marx probably would have survived and continued. We’d be talking about Rodbertian socialism or Lasallian socialism today as an academic school of thought. Instead, that’s basically nonexistent today, and you have a much larger coalesced school of thought around Marx. Frankly, it is standing on the shoulders of Lenin, whether they like it or not.

The academic Left needs to ask the question, “Why does this Marxist system that we uphold and consider to be true keep yielding these humanitarian disasters and genocide?” I would urge any academic follower of Marx today to be introspective and ask this question, “Why is this figure we rally around such a big thing? What are some of the origins and legacies that made him that way?”

Mr. Jekielek:
Philip Magness, such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mr. Magness:
Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.