The following was published this past Saturday by the satirical Montana Department Of Propaganda Facebook group, the place “where trolls go to die.”
As you’ll see, though, there’s nothing satirical about this particular post, one that marks the 143rd anniversary of the death of German philosopher, social and political theorist, economist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist Karl Marx.
Karl Marx died on March 14, 1883.
And if you strip away all the Cold War propaganda and the cartoon versions people argue about online, what Marx actually did was pretty simple. He looked at capitalism and asked a question that polite society tries very hard not to ask.
Who is doing the work . . . and who is taking the money?
Marx spent years studying factories, wages, production, and economic crises. What he noticed was something workers had already felt in their bones for generations. The people producing the wealth were not the people controlling it.
Workers built the railroads. Workers mined the coal. Workers ran the machines. Workers produced the goods.
But the profits accumulated somewhere else.
Marx called this exploitation, not as an insult, but as a mechanical description of how the system worked. If a worker produces $200 worth of value in a day but is paid $80 in wages, the remaining value does not disappear. It flows upward to owners, investors, and shareholders. That difference is what Marx called surplus value.
And once you see that dynamic, you start noticing something else Marx talked about constantly: class struggle. Not the cartoon version where people run around waving red flags. The real one. The quiet daily struggle over wages, rent, healthcare, working hours, unions, and who gets to control the wealth society produces.
You can see it today just as clearly as Marx saw it in the 1800s.
Workers told there is no money for healthcare, but there is always money for war. Teachers told budgets are tight while corporations receive tax breaks. Communities told to tighten their belts while billionaires accumulate more wealth than entire countries.
And if you want to see how this plays out in real life, you do not even have to leave Montana.
In the early 1900s, copper miners in Butte, Montana were working some of the most dangerous industrial jobs in America. The mines were controlled by the powerful Anaconda Copper Mining Company, part of the copper trust that dominated Montana’s economy and politics. Miners worked brutal hours underground surrounded by toxic dust, cave-ins, and explosions while enormous fortunes were being built above ground.
Then came the catastrophe that ignited outrage across the state. In 1917, the Speculator Mine disaster killed 168 miners, making it one of the deadliest mining disasters in American history. Workers had been demanding better safety conditions for years. The disaster triggered massive labor unrest and strengthened organizing by groups like the Industrial Workers of the World. Workers were not asking for luxury. They were asking not to die underground for someone else’s profit.
The response from the powerful was swift. Labor organizers were harassed, jailed, and sometimes murdered. One of the most infamous cases was the lynching of union organizer Frank Little in Butte in 1917 after he criticized the mining companies and war profiteering.
And the fight between workers and power wasn’t only happening in the mines. It was happening in the streets too.
In the early 1900s, members of the Industrial Workers of the World fought a series of free speech battles in Missoula, Montana. At the time, local authorities and business interests were trying to shut down labor organizing by banning public speaking on street corners. Workers responded by deliberately violating the bans. One by one they stood on soapboxes and spoke about wages, exploitation, and labor rights.
Police arrested them by the dozens.
When the jails filled up, more workers arrived.
Some were beaten. Some were thrown in overcrowded cells. But the arrests only drew more attention to the cause, and eventually the city backed down. The workers won the right to speak publicly again.
It was one of the earliest free speech fights in the American West, and it came directly out of the labor movement.
That was class struggle playing out in Montana.
For decades the Anaconda Copper Mining Company had so much control over Montana’s politics that people joked the company owned “everything but the cemeteries.” Newspapers, legislators, and policy often moved in directions that protected corporate power while workers fought for unions, wages, and safer conditions.
Fast forward to today and the pattern still looks familiar. You see it in housing struggles in places like Missoula, Montana where working people face rising rents while housing increasingly becomes an investment vehicle for distant investors. You see it in fights over wages, healthcare, and public services. You see it when politicians promise tax cuts for the wealthy while teachers, nurses, and working families are told there just is not enough money for the things communities need.
Different century. Same conflict.
Marx did not invent those contradictions. He simply pointed at them.
And that is why more than a century after his death people still argue about him. Because Marx taught ordinary people to ask a dangerous question.
Who actually benefits from the way society is organized?
Once people start asking that question, the conversation changes. And that question has been haunting the powerful ever since.
– Source
Related Off-site Links:
Was Marx Right? It's Never Too Late to Ask – Terry Eagleton (Commonweal, March 28, 2011).
For Karl Marx, Human Flourishing Is Inherently Social – Jan Kandiyali (Jacobin, October 12, 2025).
How Karl Marx Went From Student to Revolutionary – Encyclopædia Britannica. Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism Wins the 2018 Deutscher Prize – Climate and Capitalism (November 25, 2018).
Reading Marx in the Corpse of Neoliberalism – Jason Koslowski (Left Voice, July 25, 2025).
Marx and Internationalism – John Bellamy Foster (Monthly Review, July-August 2000).
Love in the Time of Capital: A Review of Mary Gabriel’s Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution – Timothy Shenk (Dissent, Summer 2012).
To Struggle!: A Review of Marcello Musto’s The Last Years of Karl Marx – Mauricio Betancourt (Monthly Review, February 2024).
See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Terry Eagleton: Quote of the Day – March 28, 2011
• The Biblical Roots of “From Each According to Ability; To Each According to Need”
• A Socialist Response to the 2008 Financial Crisis
• Heather Cox Richardson on the Origin of the American Obsession with “Socialism”
• Capitalism on Trial
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