Karl Marx’s theories sparked the Russian Revolution in 1917. His communist ideology was foundational to the USSR, and other oppressive regimes, which led to the state murder of hundreds of millions of people. Yet despite the 20th century Marxist democide, Marx remains one of the most popular so-called intellectual figures of the last century, up to this day. “Appearing in 3,856 syllabi as of 2015, Marx’s Communist Manifesto is consistently among the most frequently assigned texts in American college classrooms.”
But what if the Russian Revolution had never happened? Would anyone today even know who Karl Marx was? And is there a way to measure that empirically?
Phillip Magness, the director of research and education at AIER and his colleague Michael Makovi set out to do just that. What did they discover? In this episode of Liberty Curious, you are going to find out.
