The Problem With the Marxist Mind

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, July 01, 2026

 

“The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”

 

That’s from the Communist Manifesto. And it’s garbage.

 

We’ll come back to that. First, I remind you of (Kevin) Williamson’s First Law: “Everything is simple when you don’t know a f—ing thing about it.” This is a variant of the old line, “Everything’s a conspiracy when you don’t know how anything works.” This in turn is closely related to Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

 

I recently had Rana Dasgupta on my podcast to discuss his book After Nations: The Making and Unmaking of a World Order. To say that many readers hated it the way my old basset hound Norman hated a certain gray poodle would be an understatement—and an incredibly obscure reference. Suffice it to say, Norman was a mensch of a beast, but that gray poodle enraged him to Cujo-level hostilities. I’ll never know why.

 

But the fact is a lot of people hated it, and I was very frustrated by it. I don’t mean by Dasgupta himself. He was a decent fellow and played along. But I was very vexed by my inability to articulate what bothered me about his perspective.

 

The core problem was that we basically couldn’t get to a common agreement on some fundamental ways we think the world works. Dasgupta says he considers himself a small-l liberal in many respects, and I believe him. But his mode of analysis strikes me as a kind of elite cosmopolitan Marxism. He talks about systems being designed to do this or that. He says that the nation-state system was “designed to concentrate wealth in a small number of centers.” And the modern nation-state system was “conceived” by “American elites, particularly in the 1940s, as a universal project that would transform the lives of everybody on the planet.”

 

I’m not saying there’s no truth to any of this. I’m sure we can find some great quotes from John Foster Dulles or Dean Gooderham Acheson or some other gray flannel luminary of the midcentury establishment that lends some support to this view. But, ultimately, I think this is closer to nonsense than not. The early nation-states—you know, those Westphalian agglomerations of dynastic powers constrained by borders determined by geography and war—were formed in part to concentrate wealth in the hands of monarchs and emperors, but not just to concentrate wealth in monarchs and emperors. It was also done to protect the faith, please God, deter enemies, pursue glory, and a dozen other things.

 

The modern nation-state system organized by the U.S. and her allies was created to do all manner of things. Near the top of the list: prevent another world war and stop the communists from taking over the world. But also on that list were things like promoting trade, defending liberty, and burnishing the résumés and biographies of bureaucrats and statesmen.

 

But you know what else led to a lot of stuff? Accidents, mistakes, coincidences, unintended byproducts of new technologies, screws falling out in an imperfect world. Whatever. If the driver transporting the archduke hadn’t made a wrong turn, Gavrilo Princip would never have sparked World War I by shooting Franz Ferdinand. If Napoleon hadn’t failed in Haiti, he never would have sold the Louisiana Territory to Jefferson. The Berlin Wall fell in no small part because Günter Schabowski screwed up a press conference.

 

Now of course, the Berlin Wall would probably have come down sooner rather than later. We might have gotten the Louisiana Territory later in the 19^th century, but surely at a greater price. Whether we would have had World War I absent the events of Sarajevo is unknowable, but a different start might have led to a different ending as well.

 

Accidents and contingencies matter a lot. So do human desires and foibles. Blaise Pascal’s famous line about Cleopatra’s nose comes to mind: “Had it been shorter, the whole aspect of the world would have been altered.” But Caesar dug Cleopatra, and the rest is history. And one of the most important human desires or foibles is status. Elites compete with each other. They argue. They disagree.   

 

From the outside, institutions can seem monolithic. The institutions I know best are often described as collective nouns with monolithic intent. “National Review thinks this,” “AEI comes down on this side of the issue,” “The Dispatch says.” This is all perfectly defensible. We talk this way about Fox News and the New York Times, the Catholic Church, Major League Baseball, etc. It’s natural. But thinking this way often blinds us to the fact that many institutions have internal debates and disagreements.

 

And just because the public doesn’t see these schisms doesn’t mean they don’t exist, or that they don’t matter. As monolithically liberal as I think the Times is, I am nonetheless certain that there are internal debates where one side loses to another side, pretty much on a daily basis. Sometimes the fights don’t really matter (“Fine. The cafeteria will offer a second vegan option.”). But sometimes they surely do. If a different faction at the Times had won the internal argument over an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton, Bari Weiss probably wouldn’t be running CBS News today.

 

Heck, we put on our blinders even when we can see the schisms. The conservative majority of the Supreme Court is riven by profound—documented—disagreements. Yet an amazing number of people fall back on saying the court is a partisan “rubber stamp” for Trump.

 

The Marxist way of thinking about capitalism, or the liberal international order, or the modern nation-state, is so abstract that the role of happenstance and accidents evaporates, and the importance of human agency and leadership melts away, too. I don’t think “Marxist” is the best term for this way of thinking. Marxism is merely a very prominent example of it. But lots of modes of thought work this way, including conspiracy theories (which was what I was trying to get at in that earlier G-File). If you start from the premise that the system is rigged to reward the ruling class, the patriarchy, the oligarchs, or the Jooooooz, then internal disagreements in a society become a shadow puppet show for the rubes.  

 

According to the reified, teleological, dehumanized theories about neoliberalism, or the nation-state, or globalism—pushed by the left for nearly two centuries and by the right more and more—the “elites” are this monolithic bloc who not only know their own interests, individually and collectively, but they have the skill and agency to see them seamlessly satisfied. Every four years America tears itself apart fighting over the “most important election in our lifetimes.” But according to this “systemic” worldview, aren’t these national debates and decisions meaningless?

 

How is it that the system was designed to reward elites (however you define them) in perpetuity generation after generation, and yet the elites in every generation can’t agree on anything and can’t predict what will happen in the next week, never mind the next century? I reread Linton Wells’ memo on “Predicting the Future” at least once a year. Wells pointed out that since 1900, the world that security policy planners had expected to deal with over the subsequent decade had made fools of those planners. But the Big Plan behind The System has been working as predicted for centuries? Really?

 

That’s what’s so dumb about Marx’s line in the Communist Manifesto about the “executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” That wasn’t true then, and it’s not true now. The bourgeoisie in the mid-19^th century was divided on questions of nationality, religion, and politics. Different factions wanted different things. Some factions won—and then failed to get what they wanted. Some factions lost and ended up getting exactly what they wanted anyway. Or maybe the kaiser declared war and all the factions changed their plans.

 

Conspiracy theories are a form of this kind of systemic thinking. Marxism, of course, is in many respects a conspiracy theory (and Marx was definitely a conspiracy theorist). And the biggest problem with conspiracy theories—other than that they’re usually stupid lies—is that they breed fatalism or radicalism. When the real Powers That Be are always behind the curtain, pulling the strings and rigging the system, if every contrary piece of evidence is received as proof that the conspiracy goes even deeper, and if every event is proof that the Man always wins, and the system never fails, you’re left with two options. You can just surrender to the idea that you can’t change anything, and just not get out of bed or do anything with your life. Or you can decide to become some kind of heroic martyr in pursuit of completely tearing down the system. Both of these are stupid options.

 

Most people can see how the first option is a cop-out. But so is the second. The radical surrenders his judgment and agency to a theory—ironically a theory that says judgment and agency don’t matter. The radical decides to become an actor who simply reads from a script rather than think for himself.

 

The more exciting and rewarding course is to accept that the future is unwritten, the system is not rigged, and that your actions matter. The downside: This is the harder path. If what you do matters, then you are at least partially responsible for the consequences of what you do. You can’t blame everything on the system or outsource your agency to cosplay. The upside: Your arguments and actions matter, and you can have at least partial authorship of your life’s story.