“Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it”. – Roger Scruton
Few ideas have been so thoroughly discredited by reality as Marxism. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, it brought to an end a diabolical experiment in “progress” that devoured tens of millions of lives, trailing poverty, tyranny and human suffering in its wake. Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward killed an estimated 45 million people. Lenin and Stalin eliminated approximately 20 million through forced collectivisation, manufactured famines, and the Gulag system. Add Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and the pattern is always the same.
All morally sane people can agree: Marxism was not humanity’s greatest idea.
Yet far from dying by its own contradictions, Marxism is alive and well. Indeed, it’s enjoying a sort of renaissance in Western universities, where critical theory – a Marxist framework for analysing power and oppression – now dominates many humanities and social science departments.
How is this possible?
The substitution
The answer is surprisingly simple, though rarely grasped, even by its opponents. Marxism survived by abandoning the economic revolution at which it so spectacularly failed and instead colonised morality itself. What happened was a substitution, not an extinction. What died in 1989 was Marxism as an economic and political theory. What took its place was Marxism as a worldview – a moral framework that divides humanity into oppressors and the oppressed. This pivot changed everything.
Where economic Marxism made falsifiable predictions about harvests and material wellbeing, cultural Marxism makes none. The first kind could be tested and its failures measured; the second kind immunises itself against reality by making empiricism itself suspect. How do you falsify the claim that objectivity is a tool of oppression? Or that mathematics is an expression of white privilege? You can’t. These are theories that cannot be tested by empirical reality. They’re more akin to astrology, explaining everything and nothing while confirming what you already believe. Minorities succeeding despite oppression? That’s resilience in the face of systemic injustice. Minorities struggling? That’s the system working as designed. Heads I’m oppressed, tails you’re racist.
But why morality? Why the obsession with language and political correctness? Because these are moral claims, and morality offers what economics never could: unfalsifiability, certainty, and permanent employment for those who police it. So Marxist ideas have seeped into the language almost unnoticed, redefining speech as violence and locating injustice everywhere. Transgress this new orthodoxy and you can expect a wave of sanctimony and censure typical of a dogmatic belief system.
