Rejecting “Cartoonish Conclusions” About Marxism and Dealing with the “Actual Architecture of Our Current Reality”

I don’t know who Gary Zajc is but I sure do appreciate his recent response on Facebook to Josh Bitterman’s take on The Communist Manifesto (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels 9depicted at right by an unknown artist).

Writes Bitterman: “[Although The Communist Manifesto] makes valid points about class disparity, [it] effectively uses grievance and idealistic vision to stoke the flames of envy and class warfare. . . . If equipped with wisdom and even a basic understanding of history, one will find that it is incredibly flawed, immature, arrogant, and utopian. It completely fails to account for human nature, the existence of evil, and what we, as modern-day readers of this text, now know about how it ALWAYS plays out in reality: constrained supply, increased demand and suffering, concentration of power, authoritarianism, tyranny, and mass murder. One conclusion is that it provides a dangerous roadmap for misguided, power-hungry, and charismatic leaders to manipulate the masses.”

Following is Zajc’s response.

This is just another shallow, entry-level political analysis that passes for profundity among people who have never actually had to reckon with the machinery of poverty.

Spare us your lazy deflections just because you believe reading the text reveals it to be “flawed, immature, arrogant, and utopian” because it fails to account for “human nature” and the “existence of evil.”

By reducing economic critique to a metaphysical debate about abstract “evil” and inherent “human nature,” the you run from having to deal with the actual architecture of our current reality.

It’s ignorant to blame “human nature” or “society” for economic suffering. Why are you letting the actual architects of our economy off the hook? We do not need to look at historical authoritarian regimes to find constrained supply, immense suffering, or the radical concentration of power. We are living it.

We are currently operating under an economic system meticulously designed to keep working-class people in poverty to protect the profit margins of a ruling class. The concentration of power is happening right now, out in the open, where corporate monopolies choke supply chains to artificially inflate prices, hedge funds buy up residential neighborhoods, and massive corporations use tipping as a structural payroll subsidy so they do not have to pay their own workers a living wage. That is not the tragic inevitable result of “human nature” – it is a deliberate, engineered system.

It’s even lazier to write off valid critiques of class disparity by claiming the text uses “grievance” and “idealistic vision to stoke the flames of envy.” This is the ultimate defense mechanism of the comfortable. You turn any demand for basic human dignity into a character flaw. It is not “envy” to point out that a billionaire class is extracting wealth from the very communities that do the actual physical labor to keep this country running. It is basic math, and recognizing that math is the first step toward actual accountability.

Dismissing structural critiques of capitalism as simply a “dangerous roadmap for misguided leaders” allows your comfortable ass to sit back and pretend that the economic strangulation of the working class is just a sad, unavoidable tragedy of the human condition.

It takes zero intellectual courage to declare that challenging a rigged system is dangerous. Real courage requires looking at the system currently crushing working families, recognizing it is operating exactly as it was built to, and demanding it be dismantled.

Get off your intellectually lazy ass, grow a pair, and invest the time and effort to understand a complex system before drawing cartoonish conclusions.

– Gary Zajc
via Facebook
August 14, 2026

Related Off-site Links:
Was Marx Right? It’s Not Too Late to Ask – Terry Eagleton (Commonweal, March 28, 2011).
For Karl Marx, Human Flourishing Is Inherently Social – Jan Kandiyali (Jacobin, October 12, 2025).
Karl Marx and Why Societies Stop Growing – Peter D’Autry (Medium, July 29, 2026).
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:
• Marx and Class Struggle – Then and Now
• 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