Marx as Narrative Infrastructure: Why Dead Economists Still Shape Institutional Power

Karl Marx died in 1883 with limited readership and modest public profile. His global prominence accelerated only after 1917, when the Bolshevik Revolution institutionalised his work as state doctrine. Throughout the 20th century, Marxist economics underpinned regimes responsible for catastrophic economic collapse and, in aggregate, tens of millions of deaths. Mainstream economics moved on. The labour theory of value was superseded by marginalism in the late 19th century. Empirical evidence from the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and other centrally planned systems demonstrated chronic inefficiency, information failure, and suppressed productivity relative to market-based systems. Yet in 2026, Marx remains widely taught at leading universities. Self-described Marxist academics operate within institutions funded by market economies whose mechanisms Marx predicted would collapse.

Marx’s predictive record is weak. Industrial capitalism did generate severe exploitation during the early Industrial Revolution, but regulated market economies evolved. Labour law, suffrage expansion, welfare states, and productivity growth altered the institutional settlement. Living standards, life expectancy, and material welfare in advanced economies now exceed both 19th-century baselines and socialist counterfactuals. The persistence of Marx in academia is not an economic phenomenon. It is an institutional one.

Universities are narrative engines. Ideas can survive empirical falsification if they retain explanatory appeal, moral framing power, or institutional incumbency. Marx functions less as an economic blueprint and more as a language for critique of inequality, crisis, and power concentration. The centre of gravity is legitimacy framing, not price theory.

In the Sixth Field, ideas operate as long-duration infrastructure. Even discredited economic models can retain influence if embedded in institutional and cultural systems.

Markets price capital flows. Institutions shape regulatory climate. If academic and policy elites frame inequality or market concentration through Marx-adjacent lenses, this influences:

Capital allocation is downstream from narrative legitimacy. Investors should monitor ideological drift in elite institutions as an early signal for regulatory tightening cycles. The risk is not revolution. It is incremental reframing of market legitimacy.

The ability of an idea to survive empirical challenge by embedding within institutions and moral frameworks.

Sources: thesixthfield.com

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