I reread this essay on why Marxism became unpopular in the West. Since I am not a philosophy major and am still new to this, I asked Claude to write an article to explain this article in simple terms so that my feeble brain can understand it:

What’s Really Going On

When you remove the bullshit, nothing’s left

Heath shows how “no-bullshit Marxists” tried to clean up Marx’s theories and accidentally discovered they were defending the wrong thing. Marx always claimed he wasn’t making moral arguments against capitalism—just predicting its collapse. When that collapse never came, Marxists needed moral critiques. Turns out John Rawls had already built a better one.

The exploitation problem was unsolvable

Every brilliant mind who tried to make “exploitation” work as a critique of capitalism hit the same wall. The concept sounds powerful but falls apart when you examine it. Robert Nozick showed the core problem: if people own themselves and their talents, then taxing successful people starts to look like exploitation too. The greatest Marxist philosophers spent decades on this and all gave up.

You have to pick your battle

Gerald Cohen’s conversion reveals the key insight: you have to choose whether you care more about people getting the “full value” of their work, or about some people being poor while others are rich. Rawls let frustrated Marxists focus on what actually bothered them—inequality—without getting tangled in theories about labor value that didn’t work.

How ideas actually die

Heath makes a crucial point about intellectual history: Marxism wasn’t “refuted” by any single argument. Smart people just drifted away from it, like guests leaving a boring party for better conversation. This explains why many people don’t realize academic Marxism is dead—there was no dramatic moment, just a slow exodus to more useful frameworks.

Rawls accidentally killed a giant

The most remarkable part: Rawls never directly attacked Marx, yet his work killed Western Marxism anyway. By providing a cleaner way to critique capitalism and inequality, Rawls made Marxist theory unnecessary. He didn’t need to argue against Marx—he just built something better and let people choose.

What’s left is zombie ideology

Today’s popular Marxism is “a religion without a theology.” Since the serious theoretical work led everyone to become liberals, what remains is aggressive posturing without intellectual foundation. Publications like Jacobin represent “I’m going to talk like a Marxist even though none of it makes sense, because you can’t stop me.”