After announcing her split with the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, fashion icon Grimes was photographed reading Karl Marx’s “The Communist Manifesto,” the unreadable chunk of Victorian propaganda that is normally inflicted only on unsuspecting undergrads by grouchy professors who incorrectly feel that their labor is undervalued.
Grimes said on Instagram that with paparazzi following her around, “I tried 2 think what I could do that would yield the most onion-ish possible headline and it worked haha.”
That headline was: “Grimes seen reading Karl Marx following split with world’s richest man Elon Musk.”
She clarified, “I am not a communist although there are some very smart ideas in the book.”
Smart? Karl Marx’s ideas led to the starvation, murder and immiseration of tens of millions of people. Based on the destruct-o-meter, they are by far the worst set of ideas ever promulgated. Yet they are more enduring than The Walking Dead, high-waisted jeans or Jimmy Carter.
After all this time, #Communism! It’s a thing. A Gallup poll two years ago found that socialism — that commie-adjacent blob that no one can ever quite define to anyone else’s satisfaction — is as popular as capitalism among young folks. For Paris Fashion Week, Stella McCartney just held her runway show in the Espace Niemeyer, headquarters of the French Communist Party. Teen Vogue is running pieces with headlines like “The Democratic Socialists of America Can Mobilize Gen Z’ers Like Me” (which doesn’t sound very democratic, not with its promises to mount “a threat to capitalism’s very existence as a system of profit and exploitation”) and “Rosa Luxemburg: Who Was the Revolutionary Socialist and Author?” which claims the notorious Red was full of “prescience” that “gleams through” her writings.
On TikTok, #Communism has racked up over a billion views. So, lots of kids are trying to promote the world’s most comprehensively failed idea with, er, iPhones. Are you ready for Gen Red?
Don’t hold your breath. If Marxism ruled the tech market, these kids would be trying to text their friends between tin cans tied together with strings. IPhones came to exist because of that obscene-to-Marxists concept called “the profit margin,” freely “exploiting” the world’s cheapest labor markets. It’s so obvious that profits create economic growth and sweep away poverty that even nominally communist China has willingly turned itself into the world’s sweatshop, lifting hundreds of millions of its citizens out of destitution in the process.
Force any principle of communism onto young people, and they’ll change their minds quickly. Tell these TikTok kids that they’re going to have to start sharing their comfy bedrooms in Mom and Dad’s house with half a dozen randomly selected smelly proles pulled in from the nearest shelter, and they’ll suddenly grasp the flaws of an economy built around forced equality and mandatory sharing. “Workers of the world, er, never mind, just stay on the assembly line where you belong.”
Among people old enough to remember that little piece of historical trivia about how the Soviet Union collapsed and everyone in it started looking for statues of Lenin and Marx to tear down, communism remains frustrated by its inability to convince people it isn’t some sort of joke. On Etsy, there’s a Karl Marx coffee mug that reads, “All I want for Christmas is the means of production.” Which is why communist cheerleaders (at, say, The New York Times) prefer to use euphemisms like “late-stage capitalism” or “late capitalism” to indicate they think the revolution is nigh.
Just this week the Times, oblivious as ever to its own internal ironies, used “late capitalism” in a look back at the 1981 movie “My Dinner with Andre.” So capitalism has been on its deathbed for at least 40 years. Yet somehow, in just the last two decades, the net worth of the world’s billionaires has gone from less than $1 trillion to more than $13 trillion. Billionaires have gotten so rich that they’re now joy-riding into space thanks to levels of funding previously available only to large countries, but keep giving us those shrewd predictions, New York Times film writers! You go ahead and bet that the ways of Karl M. will finally catch on. Meanwhile, I’ll stick with Elon M.
Kyle Smith is critic-at-large for National Review.
