Karl Marx is back—and he thinks you Americans are clowns

Asia Times

4 days ago

Karl Marx is having a moment—again. Not a polite classroom cameo. Not a dusty citation buried in a syllabus. No, we're talking prime-time revival, with publishers, podcasters and politicos all vying to resurrect the bearded prophet of class war.
Princeton just dropped a new translation of ' Capital ' —the first in 50 years. Bernie Sanders remains the most famous living socialist on Earth. TikTok teens quote 'seize the means' between lip-syncs and thirst traps. And MAGA diehards bark 'Marxist!' at everything from school libraries to seatbelt laws.
Welcome to the fourth Marx boom, as historian Andrew Hartman calls it. But let's get one thing clear: most people talking about Marx—left, right or libertarian—have no idea what they're actually invoking.
Because Marx, the man, the theorist, the firestarter, has become less a thinker and more a Rorschach test. A ghost conjured by the Left for moral clarity and by the Right for moral panic.
And yet, buried beneath the hysteria, is something worth looking at. Not because Marx offers the answers but because he was asking the right questions. And America—bloated, twitchy, unequal—is finally in a position to understand them.
Marx wasn't about equality. He was about power.
This is the first mistake people make. They think Marx was some utopian, frothing about 'fairness' or 'equity' like a modern DEI consultant. He wasn't. Marx was a power analyst.
His lens wasn't moral—it was mechanical. You either owned the means of production, or you didn't. Everything else—religion, culture, law—was scaffolding. Set dressing. A way to keep the underclass sedated.
Marx never said capitalism made people mean. He said it made them replaceable . A system that turns humans into units of labor, not out of malice, but efficiency. And if you don't see that reality in Uber drivers, Amazon warehouses or AI ghostwriters cannibalizing creative work, you're blind.
Why Marx appeals to America's lost generation
Marx is back in fashion because America, in many ways, is more Marxist in condition than it has ever been. Not ideologically but structurally. A bloated elite hoards wealth and real estate. The middle class is evaporating faster than coastal cities. Work offers no security, only subscriptions. And even the fantasy of upward mobility has been repossessed.
Enter a generation saddled with debt, raised on screens, priced out of housing and force-fed bootstraps ideology while watching billionaires LARP as demigods. These young Americans don't want communism, but they're furious at capitalism. Marx didn't give them hope. He gave them blame . And blame is power's most dangerous counterforce.
The irony of the American Marxist boom
The deeper irony? Marx wouldn't have recognized most of today's 'Marxists.' Cultural obsessives more focused on pronouns than property. Tenured radicals clinging to academia like landlords to rent checks. Corporate HR departments using DEI training as a smokescreen for crushing union talk.
Marx believed in material struggle, not identity kabuki. To him, class wasn't just one axis among many—it was the engine room. Everything else, including race and gender, flowed from the economic base. The modern Left has flipped that model inside out, often without realizing it. That's not Marxism. That's mood-board activism.
The 2025 translation of ' Capital ' by Princeton is being billed as 'Marx for the twenty-first century.' But that phrase is more revealing than it intends. Because it's not about updating Marx—it's about updating us . It's about whether we're finally ready to read him not as a revolutionary or relic, but as a systems analyst. A brutal, unsentimental one.
He didn't want your virtue. He wanted your audit. He wanted to know who owned the factory, and why. Who owned the newspaper? Who funded the revolution? And who pretended they didn't?
What the Right Gets wrong
Conservatives love to shout 'Marxist!' like it's a spell that makes your enemies disappear. But what they often miss is that capitalism itself has become post-capitalist in structure.
The free market is a museum piece. What we have now is something closer to algorithmic feudalism, where tech oligarchs own the infrastructure of communication, culture and commerce. Not factories—servers. Not railroads—data.
Marx saw feudalism mutate into capitalism. What he didn't live long enough to see was capitalism mutate into platform monopolies. If the lords once controlled land, and the industrialists controlled labor, today's titans control the interface. And when you control the interface, you don't need to own the worker. You just own their access to work.
What the Left gets wrong
The Left romanticizes Marx but forgets he was diagnosing disease, not prescribing utopia. He didn't tell you what to build—he just showed you what would collapse. Every time someone waves a hammer-and-sickle flag while sipping Starbucks and tweeting about revolution, a ghost in Highgate Cemetery rolls its eyes.
The real tragedy is that the Left, by abandoning class for cultural abstraction, has forfeited the very tools Marx gave them. They're trying to cut steel with slogans. They've replaced critique with vibes. And the ruling class couldn't be more thrilled.
Marx doesn't need to be right, just useful.
Of course, Marx got many things wrong. He underestimated capitalism's plasticity. He misunderstood the role of the middle class. And he didn't see how consumerism would morph exploitation into entertainment.
But he understood cycles. He saw how inequality, left unchecked, hollows out empires. He saw how narratives are used to justify hierarchies. And he saw that the people most confident in their system are usually the ones who benefit most from not questioning it.
Sound familiar? You don't have to be a Marxist to read Marx. You just have to be awake. Because for all the noise, what's unfolding in America isn't a cultural revolution—it's a class reckoning. And if you look past the hashtags and hysteria, you'll see that Marx isn't returning as a prophet. He's returning as a mirror.
And America, bloated and broken and blindfolded by its own exceptionalism, is finally starting to look.