The American Long March: The Communist Plot to Destroy American Universities

Karl Marx’s central theory was that capitalism would, under the weight of its own contradictions, generate the conditions for its own overthrow. The working class would eventually recognize the purportedly poor conditions under capitalism, collectively revolt against the state, and — after mass death and a ‘transitional’ dictatorship — history would miraculously end in a global bohemian utopia.

This obviously didn’t happen. In fact, the opposite happened.

What followed was a significant societal improvement under capitalism. The welfare state progressed, the middle class expanded, wages rose, and workers in the West stopped being particularly interested in seizing the means of production. The American working classes, on whom the entire communist project depended, instead of revolting, bought high-tech refrigerators on credit and comfortably watched baseball on the newest TV that capitalism had to offer.