I can’t BELIEVE Karl Marx said:

“Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

Wait, sorry, that was Abraham Lincoln.

Every smart person in history agrees with Marx or predates him with similar ideas (Smith, Hamilton, Rousseau). You have to be literally as dumb as shit to not think class power is linked to politics. Marx’s great sin was simply that he saw that link as exploitative.

Marx and Engels took the link between class power, material production, politics, and society (a link whose study long predated them) and used it to explain how history results from those forces and not from idealism. It’s a perfectly reasonable idea that makes a lot of sense.

Most educated people in politics and media haven’t read >10 pages of work from Marx, Smith, Rousseau, or anyone else. If they had they’d realize Marx’s view of capitalism was rational and his ideas were grounded in ones that great thinkers continually agree on throughout history.

When your Republican and liberal friends say some wistful Sorkin-ass pablum like “Gone be the days of the Party of Lincoln” or whatever you are hereby encouraged to remind them that Abe was a Marxist.

This doesn’t mean Lincoln was a ‘Marxist’ in the sense of Ho Chi Minh or Guevara. He was conservative by comparison. But if he were alive now and said this on the 2020 campaign trail, it’s guaranteed he’d be labeled as such by every political analyst to the right of Chomsky.