The Myth of Marxism

& the grand delusion of "socialistic" labels

Peter Joseph is a filmmaker & author; host of the podcast Revolution Now! and one can support his work through Patreon.

I swear, it never ends, right?

Ever noticed how every serious conversation about economic systems eventually crashes into the same wall? Someone utters the word socialism — and half the room hears “Soviet gulags” while the other half sees sunshine and lollipops.

This is not an anomaly. It is the predictable result of using words that function as tribal signals rather than analytical categories — terms so overloaded with ideology, history, and propaganda that they can no longer carry the weight of real argument (assuming they ever did).

The words causing the most damage are, as always, socialism, communism, and Marxism — not because they describe dangerous things, but because they never described anything with precision to begin with.

Yet, they are routinely treated as if they name concrete social and economic systems — institutional blueprints that are comparable to market-based economies, which actually do have identifiable mechanics: private property, price signals, competitive exchange, profit-seeking firms, and monetary accounting that coordinates production and distribution.

But the fact is: these terms were never institutional blueprints. They emerged as philosophical critiques of the existing order, as historical theories, as aspirational visions. They specified what was wrong far, far more clearly than they specified what should replace it.

And treating them as system designs equivalent to any functioning economic model is like treating a prosecutor’s indictment as an architectural plan for a new courthouse. The two things are not the same kind of object.

No, Marx Did Not Write an Operating Manual

The assumption behind most political debate is that Marxist texts contain a detailed design for a “socialist” society. That assumption collapses into oblivion on contact with the actual literature.

Marx spent the overwhelming majority of his intellectual energy analyzing capitalism — how surplus value is extracted, how class relations form, how markets expand, how crises emerge from systemic contradictions. Das Kapital, all three volumes of it, is fundamentally a forensic examination of capitalism’s mechanics. Volume I alone runs to nearly 900 pages of dense analysis of the commodity form, the working day, and the accumulation of capital. What it does not contain is a chapter on how to run a railway network, set agricultural output targets, or adjudicate between competing industrial priorities.

Frederick Engels, Marx’s closest collaborator, was candid about this gap. In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), he explicitly distinguished Marx’s approach from the earlier socialists — Fourier, Owen, Saint-Simon — who did try to draw up detailed blueprints for ideal communities. Marx deliberately avoided that kind of specification. His method was historical and critical, not architectural.

Marx himself acknowledged the ambiguity about what would follow capitalism. In his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program, he described a future “communist” society that would initially emerge “just as it emerges from capitalist society” — a transitional condition shaped by what it was replacing, not a clean design dropped in from outside.

The practical consequence is significant. If you handed ten newly formed nations the complete works of Marx and asked each to build a functional economy from those texts alone, you would get ten different institutional arrangements.

And this is not a hypothetical — it essentially happened: Yugoslavia under Tito built a system of worker self-management and “market socialism” that looked nothing like the Soviet command economy, and both claimed Marx as their theoretical foundation. Cuba’s centrally planned economy, Vietnam’s post-1986 Doi Moi market reforms, and China’s state capitalism today all operate under “communist” party rule while functioning in structurally incompatible ways. If a shared theoretical tradition produced systems this different, the assumed tradition cannot be what’s actually driving the institutional outcomes.

This is not a minor technical point. It means that when critics say “socialism failed,” they are making a category error — condemning a philosophical tradition for the performance of states that adopted it as a political identity, not a universal design specification.

The Label Was a Political Signal, Not a System Description

Countries that called themselves socialist or communist are routinely grouped together as if they represent variations of a single model. The closer you look, the faster that falls apart.

The Soviet Union under Stalin operated a centralized command economy with collectivized agriculture enforced at gunpoint. Again, Yugoslavia under Tito, expelled from the Soviet bloc in 1948, built a decentralized system where firms were managed by workers’ councils and competed in markets. Both called themselves socialist. Yet, they were structurally incompatible.

Cuba nationalized most industry and implemented a Soviet-style planned economy. Vietnam — after reunification in 1975 — did the same, then dismantled most of it in 1986 when the system produced chronic food shortages, pivoting to a market-oriented model that retained “communist” party control but liberalized private enterprise. Today Vietnam has a stock exchange, a thriving private sector, and significant foreign direct investment. And yes, it still calls itself a socialist republic.

Is it?

China is perhaps the sharpest case. Since Deng Xiaoping’s reforms beginning in 1978, China has built one of the most dynamic clearly capitalist-rooted economies in the world — with private entrepreneurs, massive wealth inequality, and deep integration into global markets — while maintaining a Communist Party monopoly on political power. It has more billionaires than any country except the United States. Whatever it is, it is not what anyone in 1917 meant by communism I think we can agree.

So what’s going on? Well, here’s the thing (and pay attention as this is extremely important):

What these states shared is/was not an institutional architecture but a political positioning: a declaration of rupture from the economic order dominated by Western capitalist powers. For nations emerging from colonialism or geopolitical pressure, calling yourself socialist was primarily a symbolic act — a statement of civilizational opposition, not an announcement that you had implemented a specific economic design. A pattern that continues to this day.

Read that again, please. It’s all marketing.

The Nazi example makes this even clearer. The full name of Hitler’s party was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. His regime violently suppressed self professed socialist and communist movements, dissolved trade unions, sent those pesky “Marxists” to the first concentration camps, and built a state closely aligned with industrial elites like Krupp, IG Farben, and Thyssen. The word “socialist” in the party name was a deliberate marketing choice targeting working-class voters — it described nothing about how power and production were actually organized.

And a nation’s branding is not its operating system.

The Rhetorical Trap:

Western political discourse didn’t stumble into this confusion — it weaponized it. The result is one of the most effective self-reinforcing propaganda techniques the United States and the broader West have ever deployed. The goal? Preserve market capitalism & the elite power structure it creates, moving against anything that challenges the structure of that system and condition.

In the United States, the pattern has repeated across generations. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was called “socialist.” Why? Because it moved against free enterprise. So was Truman’s proposal for national health insurance in 1948. So was Medicare when Lyndon Johnson signed it in 1965 — Ronald Reagan recorded an LP warning that it would lead to a Soviet-style state. So was the Affordable Care Act in 2010. So is any proposal to expand public services today.

The mechanism works like this: whenever a country that called itself socialist experiences economic failure, repression, or collapse, those outcomes are cited as proof that any alternative to capitalism must inevitably produce the same results. The argument is never stated so bluntly. Instead the language softens and shifts:

Socialism failed. Communism failed. Every attempt at collectivism ends in disaster.

What these phrases are actually doing — quietly, without acknowledgment — is substituting for a much larger claim: that market capitalism is the only viable way to organize a modern society, and that any deviation from it leads to catastrophe. That is the true meaning. That is the true intent, even if people don’t know it when they say these kinds of things.

The problem is that the countries routinely cited as evidence for this claim — Venezuela, Cuba, the Soviet Union — have almost nothing institutionally in common with Denmark, Norway, or Germany, which combine substantial public ownership, strong welfare states, and heavy regulation with market economies, and consistently rank among the world’s most livable and economically competitive nations. If “socialism” means Venezuela, it cannot also mean Norway. If the label covers both, it has ceased to function as a meaningful analytical category and is doing purely rhetorical work.

Once a reform proposal gets associated with one of these stigmatized labels, it can be dismissed without analysis. The ideological category performs the argumentative work in advance.

The Real Pattern Being Misidentified

The most persistent charge against whatever gets lumped together under the label “socialism” is that it inevitably produces authoritarian regimes. This argument contains a logical flaw that is rarely examined directly.

The pattern that actually recurs across these states is not some essence of “socialism.” It is authoritarian hierarchy in and of itself— centralized power, limited accountability, suppression of dissent, bureaucratic command structures. Hierarchies are easy to create. They are easy to enforce. You don't need some historical ideological text to implement one. In fact, one could argue that a nation state hierarchy is almost the de facto condition. And this pattern appears within the full, claimed ideological spectrum, attached to wildly different economic arrangements, none of which share a coherent underlying system, once again.

Pinochet’s Chile implemented market-oriented economic reforms while operating one of the most brutal repressive apparatuses in Latin American history — with the active support of the U.S. government and the intellectual endorsement of economists from the University of Chicago. Indonesia under Suharto, who came to power in 1965 by massacring between 500,000 and one million people (most of them suspected communists), was subsequently embraced by Western governments as a model of market-friendly development. Saudi Arabia runs a state-controlled oil economy with no elections, no independent judiciary, and no freedom of expression — and is a cornerstone of the Western-aligned international order.

Authoritarianism flourishes across all historically documented economic systems no matter the labels thrown upon them, going back 1000s of years. Its recurring features — concentrated power, weak accountability mechanisms, suppression of organized opposition — are structural problems of governance, not the product of any particular ideological label.

There is also a theoretical irony here that deserves more attention than it receives. If you actually read Marx and Engels, they were not advocating for permanent state control at all. In the Communist Manifesto they wrote that “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” Marx’s concept of communism involved the eventual dissolution of class domination and the withering away of coercive state power. Engels, late in his life, explicitly criticized authoritarian tendencies in the workers’ movement. Whether these visions were realistic is a fair question. But the claim that the tradition these thinkers founded inherently promotes dictatorship directly contradicts the texts most often cited to justify it.

The Same Word, Twenty Different Objects

Part of what makes this debate so reliably unproductive and deeply frustrating is that the same words mean entirely different things depending on who is using them.

Ask a social democrat in Sweden what “socialism” means and they will describe a regulated market economy with strong labor protections, universal healthcare, and high taxes. Ask a Marxist-Leninist and they will describe the revolutionary seizure of the means of production. Ask a libertarian and they will describe any government program more extensive than a road. Ask someone who grew up in East Germany and you may get something else entirely.

These are not variations on the same idea. They are structurally different arrangements with different mechanics, different incentive structures, and genuinely different track records. Sweden and the Soviet Union are not versions of the same thing. Treating them as if they are — which the current political vocabulary actively encourages — makes serious comparison impossible.

A word that simultaneously describes Stockholm and Stalinism has lost its analytical usefulness. It is functioning as a mood, not a category.

What Would Actually Useful Questions Look Like?

If such ideological labels obscure more than they reveal, serious analysis has to move to the level of institutional mechanics.

The relevant questions are structural: How does a system coordinate production across large populations? How does it allocate resources and process information about scarcity and demand? How does it correct mistakes and adapt to changing conditions? How is decision-making power distributed, and what mechanisms hold that power accountable? How does it handle ecological constraints?

These are the questions engineers, systems scientists, and institutional economists ask — and they are hard questions with complicated answers that vary enormously by context, scale, and historical circumstance. They do not yield to tribal shorthand.

Comparing Sweden’s universal healthcare system with the U.S. private insurance model is a tractable empirical question with measurable outcomes: cost per capita, mortality rates, coverage rates, administrative overhead, patient satisfaction. Asking whether one is “socialist” and the other “capitalist” tells you almost nothing useful about how either actually works. The label is a distraction from the mechanism.

The Consistent Pattern

Debates about these terms generate more heat than clarity because the words themselves are unstable and vague and have a little functional utility — operating simultaneously as philosophical traditions, historical political identities, propaganda weapons, and vague umbrella categories for everything that isn’t market capitalism.

Meanwhile, the pattern that most consistently explains political outcomes — how hierarchical power concentrations form, persist, and resist accountability, regardless of the ideological banner they fly under — goes largely unexamined because the conversation never gets that far.

The result is symbolic combat: people defending or attacking labels while the actual mechanics of how societies organize power, production, and distribution go unanalyzed and unchanged.

That will not change until the question shifts from what is it called? to how does it actually work?

Peter Joseph is a filmmaker & author; host of the podcast Revolution Now! and one can support his work through Patreon.