“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.
Of course, we rarely see hammers and sickles – nobody save a few sociology lecturers and Jeremy Corbyn wield the Communist Manifesto – but the same ideas are there, hidden in the policy small print and refashioned into the acronyms and initialisms that stalk public life.
So Fortune 500 companies run diversity audits that sort employees into privileged and marginalised. It’s why universities like Stanford publish lists of “harmful” words to be eliminated, as though reality itself must conform to ideological etiquette. It explains why museums apologise for their collections and why publishers remove “offensive” words from children’s literature to meet ideological fashion.
Most of all, it explains the strange transformation of the HR department from the bland office down the hall into a sinister panopticon at the centre of the organisation, prosecuting thought crimes, dispatching employees to re-education camps (training days), and monitoring employees for wrongthink.
The new priesthood
The philosopher Roger Scruton saw it clearly. “It is not the truth of Marxism that explains the willingness of intellectuals to believe it”, he wrote, “but the power it confers on them”.
Scruton cut an isolated figure in the academy, probably because he understood so clearly what his left-wing colleagues refused to acknowledge, that ideas spread because they’re useful, not because they’re true. Marxism has always given intellectuals and academics what they prize above all: influence and status. As religion declined in Western societies, a new priestly class emerged, dispensing critiques of power, diagnosing society’s hidden ills and flattering themselves that they held the reins of history. The collapse of religion left a priesthood vacant. Intellectuals seized it, and Marxism gave them their doctrine.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the Frankfurt School, whose thinkers – observing that economic determinism failed to produce revolution – shifted Marxist ideas from the factory floor to the superstructure of culture, language, and consciousness itself. Under this framework, oppression wasn’t the material exploitation of one class by another but something that operated through civilisational norms at the deepest levels. Where the working class had failed to overthrow capitalism, the new revolution would be handled by intellectuals set on “deconstructing” our societies from within.
Call it what you like: critical theory, wokeness, social justice, cultural Marxism. Wikipedia says “cultural Marxism” is a far-right conspiracy theory – of course it does. The smear doesn’t change the reality it describes.
The transformations has taken root first and foremost in our universities, which teach that history, far from being a series of events we can interpret and discuss reasonably, is really just a competing set of narratives. Hence “the truth” became “my truth” and “your truth” – a rhetorical sleight of hand that sounds generous at first but masks totalitarian instincts. Because if there is no objective truth beyond differing perspectives, then the only variable that counts is power. So which perspectives should count if we’re to achieve the good life? Why, the intellectuals’, of course.
This is the epistemological engine of the whole project. Once you’ve declared truth relative, only one question remains: whose perspective prevails? The answer, conveniently, turns out to be the perspective of those doing the declaring.
Notice how the people who condemn the evils of meritocracy are the ones who’ve secured a position within it. Having climbed the ladder they then pull it away from those who follow, explaining that the ladder is “problematic”. This is how moral superiority is claimed by those who benefited most from the very privileges they now condemn. Luxury beliefs, as Rob Henderson named them – opinions that confer status on the wealthy while imposing costs on everyone else.
The new elites love the word “narrative” – we hear it all the time because it elbows truth to the sidelines. The rest of us are meant to disregard what we see with our own eyes. Common sense is treated as suspicious. Questioning the narrative is bigotry. Crime, we’re told, is “a symptom of structural oppression”. Biology is “a social construct designed to enforce gender binaries”. Disagreement becomes “literal violence”. At the extreme end of these delusions, we have academics telling us with a straight face that maths and logic are tools of white supremacism.
If our politics feels increasingly deranged, if gaslighting seems a permanent feature of public discourse, it is for this reason primarily: the elite and the public are using different epistemologies. One side thinks you settle disputes with evidence and argument, or plain common sense. The other thinks these are power moves disguised as reason.
Seizing the memes of reproduction
Ideas, good or bad, replicate. They behave like “memes” in Richard Dawkins’ sense – self-copying units that survive by embedding themselves in institutions capable of transmitting them.
The original Marxists wanted to seize the means of production – the factories, fields, and forges. The new ones seized the memes of reproduction – educational content, media narratives, HR protocols, and museums. The very language itself.
Today’s revolutionaries didn’t storm the institutions but marched through them – or, at least, occupied influential and well-compensated positions within them. Gradually, through hiring decisions, editorial guidelines, and HR policies, they embedded their worldview into the operating system of Western culture.
The irony is bleak and funny at the same time. Consider the tenured professor on six figures teaching wide-eyed students that capitalism is violence. The NGO executives flying business class to the other side of the planet for conferences about decolonisation or racist weather systems. The “socialist” senator interviewed on CNN about grave social injustices from one of his mansions on Long Island.
Who pays the price for these luxury beliefs? It’s the working-class girl who’s told that her poor exam results are the fault of structural racism rather than a failing school system. It’s the man fired from his job for a clumsy joke that transgressed speech codes nobody knew existed. The 20-something detransitioner living out the rest of her life with a ruined body because clinicians were too frightened to question a teenager’s self-diagnosis.
None of this is Marxism in its original sense. Few, even on the left, pretend any longer that it can reorganise economies without massive top-down coercion and the oppression that inevitably follows.
But under a new guise – and conspicuously avoiding the original label – Marxism found a home in the minds of people who shape our culture, starting with intellectuals and trickling down through our institutions.
That’s why it didn’t die. Because more than anything, Marxist ideas serve the psychological needs of those who spread them. They offer a source of meaning and status for people whose education prepared them for a world that exists only in the imagination.
The real awakening
The revolution came, just not quite how anyone expected. We didn’t notice it at first because it wore a lanyard and spoke in soothing platitudes about fairness and the evils of racism – things no decent person would disagree with.
But these ideas hardened into something else. Diversity and inclusion came to mean conformity and exclusion; merit became suspect; identity rather than character became the dominant variable. Disagreement became evidence that you were on the wrong side: morally suspect, bigoted, racist. It’s not Marxism, they said – it’s just being on the right side of history.
But that calculation is starting to fail. Parents are pulling their children out of schools that teach them to hate their country or pretend that men can get pregnant. Voters are rejecting politicians who speak in DEI jargon. Corporations have discovered that playing these games breeds resentment, not productivity.
We’ve been told for years that noticing obvious patterns makes us bigots. The revolutionaries won the battle for our institutions because the rest of us were too lazy, too polite, or too afraid to state obvious truths and reject obvious lies. But ordinary people are finding their voices again. Eventually, everyone notices the emperor has no clothes – and more importantly, that everyone else has noticed too.
Marxism, in its adaptive and persistent way, has survived this long because we put up with it for our own convenience.
But it will die the moment we stop playing along. That moment has arrived.
You might also like:
This is obviously a large subject, and if I tried to cover every caveat and nuance, it would turn into a dissertation, which isn’t the aim here. That said, I welcome good-faith disagreement. If you found the piece thought-provoking, a 'like' helps it reach others. And if you haven’t already, consider subscribing to get more like this straight to your inbox.
Wonderful Frederick ! A tour de force of reason in a world full of insanity.