The Three Appeals of a Bad Idea: How Marxism Persuades
If you’ve followed the work on the three classical appeals—ethos, the appeal from credibility; logos, the appeal from reasoning; and pathos, the appeal from emotion—you have a diagnostic tool most people never think to use. You can point it not just at a speech, but at an ideology. You can ask of any belief system: what is the source of its authority? What is the structure of its argument? And what is the emotional engine that makes people accept it?
When you point that tool at Marxism and its descendants, something striking comes into focus. Because the enduring appeal of this family of ideas—an appeal that has survived a century of catastrophic real-world failure—cannot be explained by its track record. Its track record is one of blood and failure. It has to be explained rhetorically. The staying power lies in a particular and very effective combination of borrowed credibility, unfalsifiable argument, and powerful emotion. That combination is worth understanding, whatever you think of the politics, because it’s one of the most successful persuasion machines in modern history.
A necessary caveat before we start, and I mean it. This is an analysis of Marxism as a rhetorical and intellectual phenomenon—the case its serious critics have made, from Hayek and Popper to Kolakowski, Aron, and Scruton. I’ll present that case at full strength, because a critique that can’t stand at full strength isn’t worth reading. But I’ll flag where a claim is a critic’s interpretation rather than settled fact, and I’ll close with the honest counterpoints. The goal is to understand a persuasion machine, not to caricature the millions of thoughtful people who’ve been moved by these ideas—many drawn by genuine moral concern for real suffering. That concern is exactly what the machine runs on, and taking it seriously is the whole point.
We’ll go in three phases: original Marxism, the Frankfurt School, and the cultural descendants active today. In each, we’ll look at the same three things—the ethos, the logos, and the pathos.
Phase One: Original Marxism
The Ethos — “Scientific Socialism”
The single most important move Marx and Engels ever made was rhetorical, and it happened in the packaging. They called their system scientific socialism. They positioned it explicitly against what they dismissed as “utopian” socialism—the earlier reformers who merely dreamed of a better world. Marx, by contrast, claimed to have discovered the actual laws of history, the way Newton discovered the laws of motion or Darwin the mechanism of life. Historical materialism was presented not as a preference or a hope but as a science—the objective, inevitable unfolding of history through class struggle toward a predetermined end.
This is a borrowed-authority move, and it’s the foundation of everything that follows. In the nineteenth century, science carried immense and rising prestige. The industrial revolution, theory of evolution, and medical breakthroughs of the 19th century made science one of the most credible sources of new information. By draping the theory in the mantle of science, Marx transferred all of that prestige onto what was, in fact, a philosophical and political argument. The claim to be “scientific” did enormous work: it meant your opponents weren’t just wrong, they were unscientific—flat-earthers standing against the march of knowledge. It meant the conclusions were inevitable, not chosen, which relieved believers of the burden of justifying them on ordinary moral or practical grounds. And it meant that to disagree was to be, almost by definition, either ignorant or a defender of a doomed order.
The critic’s charge—made most sharply by Karl Popper—is that this was false ethos. Popper argued that a genuine science makes risky, falsifiable predictions: it tells you what would prove it wrong. Marxism, he said, did the opposite. It made grand predictions (the impoverishment of the workers, the collapse of capitalism from its own contradictions, revolution arriving first in the most advanced industrial economies), and when those predictions failed, the theory was not abandoned but adjusted—supplemented with auxiliary explanations that saved it from refutation. Workers got richer instead of poorer? The theory absorbs it. Revolution came to agrarian Russia, not industrial Britain? The theory absorbs that too. A framework that can absorb any outcome, Popper argued, predicts nothing—and a theory that forbids nothing is not scientific, however scientific it sounds. The prestige of science, on this reading, was claimed but not earned.
The Logos — The Argument That Can’t Lose
The internal reasoning of Marxism is genuinely impressive as a structure—which is part of its seductive power. It is a totalizing system: it offers to explain history, economics, politics, religion, morality, and consciousness itself through a single lens, class conflict driven by material forces. There is real intellectual pleasure in a theory that seems to explain everything, and Marx was a formidable thinker; the appeal isn’t stupidity, it’s the appeal of a master key.
But critics locate two deep flaws in the logos.
The first is at the economic foundation: the labor theory of value, inherited from Ricardo, which holds that the value of a commodity derives from the labor embodied in it, and that profit is therefore extracted “surplus value”—the exploitation of the worker built into the very structure of wages. From this the whole moral architecture follows: capitalism is not merely unequal, it is theft, systematically. The problem, critics argue, is that the labor theory of value was superseded and disproven. The “marginal revolution” in economics established that value is subjective and set at the margin by supply and demand—by how much a buyer wants the next unit—not by labor content. You can work for a thousand hours on a product no one wants and it has no value. That simple observation overturns Marx’s core premise. A thing is not valuable because labor went into it; labor goes into it because it’s valuable. If that’s right, the entire concept of “surplus value,” and with it the technical claim that profit is exploitation, loses its foundation. The moral edifice was built on an economic floor that gave way.
The second flaw is the unfalsifiability we already met—but it runs deeper than failed predictions. It’s baked into the theory’s account of knowledge itself. Marxism holds that your consciousness is determined by your class position—that the ideas of any age are the ideas of its ruling class, and that those who disagree with Marxism are suffering from “false consciousness,” ideology imposed by the material order they don’t even perceive. Notice what this does to argument. It’s an unanswerable move. If you object to Marxism, your objection isn’t engaged on its merits—it’s diagnosed as a symptom of your class position or your false consciousness. The disagreement becomes evidence of the very thing you’re disagreeing with. It’s also the hallmark of every high-control group, like cults. This is a sealed epistemology: a system that explains away all dissent as a product of the forces the system describes cannot be argued with, only joined or refused. That’s rhetorically powerful and intellectually fatal—it’s the mark of a closed system rather than an open inquiry.
The Pathos — Resentment, Utopia, and the Enemy
If the ethos is borrowed and the logos is sealed, the real engine is emotional—and here Marxism is extraordinarily powerful, which is why it persists to this day. Three emotions do most of the work.
The first is a righteous response to real suffering. This must be said plainly, because it’s the source of the whole thing’s moral force: the conditions Marx wrote against were often genuinely horrific. Nineteenth-century industrial capitalism did produce brutal exploitation, child labor, and poverty. Marxism’s pathos, like most lies, begins in a true and honorable emotion—outrage at real injustice. That’s what makes it moral rather than merely envious, and it’s why decent people are drawn to it. The critique isn’t that the anger is fake. It’s that a legitimate anger gets harnessed to an illegitimate system.
The second emotion is utopia—the promise of a final resolution. Not merely a better society but the end of all alienation, the end of all exploitation, the end of history itself in a communist paradise of human fulfillment. This is a secular version of a religious hope—heaven brought to earth—and it generates enormous motivational energy. But it also licenses enormous costs. If a perfect and permanent end-state is genuinely achievable, then almost any present sacrifice can be justified as the price of paradise. No more liberty? Justified. Political violence? Justified. Millions of deaths? Justified. The utopian promise is precisely what disarms the ordinary moral objections to the means, because the stakes are made infinite.
The third, and darkest, is the manufactured enemy. Marxism divides the world cleanly into oppressor and oppressed—bourgeoisie and proletariat—and locates the source of suffering in an identifiable class of villains. It is, if you have followed me for very long, the point I make when I discuss how the political extremes use identity to divide. Schmitt actually believed Marx’s class struggle was an example of his own idea, the friend-enemy distinction.
“Karl Marx: bourgeoisie and proletariat. This antithesis concentrates all antagonisms of world history into one single final battle against the last enemy of humanity. ... By so doing a mighty friend-enemy grouping is forged.” - Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political
It is important to note that both Nazis and Communists shared a common belief. This is emotionally satisfying in a specific and dangerous way. It externalizes evil: your problems are not the result of a difficult world or even your own choices but of them, the exploiters, the rich, the Jews, or whatever. It provides a target for grievance, a permission for hatred, and a clean story of good and evil. Critics from Aron to Scruton emphasize how much of the movement’s energy came from this licensed resentment—and how naturally the abstract “class enemy” translated, in power, into real enemies to be liquidated. When a whole category of persons is defined as the embodiment of injustice, their elimination can feel not like murder but like justice.
Phase Two: The Frankfurt School
By the early twentieth century, orthodox Marxism faced an awkward problem: its central prediction had failed. The workers of the advanced capitalist countries had not developed revolutionary consciousness. They’d gotten richer, joined unions, bought homes, and shown a stubborn preference for reform over revolution. In short, they wanted to own their own shit. The proletariat declined to play its assigned role. Something had to explain the failure—and the Frankfurt School, a group of largely German Marxist intellectuals, provided it, in the process transforming Marxism from an economic doctrine into a cultural one.
The Ethos — From Science to the Seminar
The Frankfurt School’s authority was of a different kind: not the prestige of natural science but the prestige of the academy and of dense, difficult, high-cultural theory. Thinkers like Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse produced work of formidable scholarship and formidable obscurity, drawing on Hegel, Freud, and high European culture. The ethos here is the authority of the credentialed intellectual, the difficulty of the prose functioning as its own kind of gatekeeping—the sense that if you don’t understand it, the failure is yours.
The critic’s charge is that this was a retreat into authority as the empirical claims failed. When your falsifiable predictions have been falsified, one option is to abandon the theory; another is to move it somewhere it can no longer be tested. Cultural critique—of art, of “the culture industry,” of the psychological structure of the authoritarian personality—is far harder to check against reality than a prediction about wages. The move from economics to culture, on this reading, is partly a move from the falsifiable to the unfalsifiable, dressed in the growing prestige of the university.
The Logos — Critical Theory and the Permanent Critique
Here is the pivotal intellectual innovation, and it deserves to be understood precisely because it’s genuinely clever. The Frankfurt School developed what they called critical theory. And critical theory, by its own explicit design, is different from traditional theory. Traditional theory tries to understand the world. Critical theory sets out to critique and change it—to expose the hidden structures of domination underneath every apparently neutral institution, norm, and cultural product.
Notice the structure of this as a logos. It’s a method that can be applied to anything and that always returns the same kind of result: whatever you examine—the family, the legal system, popular music, standards of objectivity, sex, the very idea of reason—can be unmasked as a vehicle of oppression, a mechanism by which the existing order reproduces and legitimates itself. And crucially, the theory is never required to propose a workable alternative; its job is critique. This is enormously powerful and, critics argue, enormously corrosive, because it’s an engine of permanent, unfalsifiable suspicion. There is no institution it cannot indict, because indictment is what it’s built to produce. And because it need not specify what a non-oppressive arrangement would look like in concrete terms, it can never be shown to have failed. It is critique freed from the burden of construction—and therefore critique that can run forever.
One further move matters: the concept of “repressive tolerance,” associated with Marcuse. If the workers won’t revolt because they’re comfortable and free, then perhaps freedom and comfort are themselves the problem—perhaps tolerance, prosperity, and liberal openness are subtle instruments of oppression that keep people docile. The apparent freedom of liberal society gets reinterpreted as a more insidious form of unfreedom. Critics regard this as the theory protecting itself against its own refutation: the very fact that people in free societies don’t feel oppressed becomes proof of how deep the oppression goes. Contentment is redefined as false consciousness with a new vocabulary. Once again, no possible evidence can count against the thesis.
The Pathos — Alienation and the Grievance That Can’t Be Satisfied
The emotional engine shifts, too, and adapts brilliantly to a prosperous society where the old appeal to material misery had lost its bite. If people are no longer poor, you cannot mobilize them with poverty. But you can mobilize them with alienation—the sense that beneath the comfort, something is deeply wrong, that modern life is hollow, that one is unfree in ways one can’t quite name, that the whole system is a subtle machine of psychological domination. This is a pathos exquisitely suited to affluent, educated, dissatisfied people—and it locates the discontent not in oneself but, again, in the System.
And here the critics identify something important about the shape of this emotion: it is a grievance that, by design, cannot be satisfied. Material demands can be met—wages can rise, conditions can improve, and then the grievance is resolved and the movement loses its fuel. But a grievance located in the hidden structures of consciousness and culture can never be fully answered, because the theory guarantees the oppression is always still there, deeper down, in whatever remains. The issue is never the issue—The issue is always revolution. This produces permanent revolution—not toward a concrete achievable goal, but as a stance, an identity, an endless unmasking. The reward is not victory but the ongoing moral status of the critic: the one who sees through it all, who is awake to the domination the sleeping masses can’t perceive.
Phase Three: The Cultural Descendants Today
Here we reach the most contested claim, and this is exactly where these arguments usually turn into sloppy name-calling—and where an honest version has to separate what’s real lineage from what’s loose analogy.
The strong thesis—argued by critics like Christopher Rufo, James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Douglas Murray—is that the contemporary “social justice” or “woke” movement is the direct heir of this tradition: that critical theory migrated from the Frankfurt School into the American academy, spawned the various “critical” fields (critical race theory, critical pedagogy, and the applied identity studies), and from there into institutions, corporations, and the broader culture. On this reading, the same three-part rhetorical structure reappears, transposed from class to identity.
Let me lay out the parallel at full strength, and then draw the honest line.
The ethos is, again, borrowed authority—now the authority of the university, of “research shows,” of credentialed expertise and lived-experience claims that position the speaker beyond challenge. The prestige of the academy stands in for the old prestige of “science.”
The logos is critical theory’s method, intact: the unmasking of hidden power structures beneath every neutral-seeming institution, now with identity categories in the structural role once played by class. And the sealed epistemology returns in a new key. Where classical Marxism diagnosed dissent as “false consciousness,” the descendant framework can diagnose disagreement as a function of the objector’s identity or privilege—an argument you can’t answer on the merits, because the act of objecting is reinterpreted as evidence of the thing being alleged. Standpoint claims can be deployed so that some positions are, in principle, beyond the reach of contrary argument. That’s the same closed structure Popper identified, wearing new clothes.
The pathos is the same trio, transposed: a genuine and honorable response to real injustices (this must be conceded—like early industrial capitalism, the historical injustices at issue were often real and grievous); the utopian promise of a fully liberated and equitable end-state; and the manufactured enemy, now defined by identity categories rather than economic class, but serving the same emotional function—externalizing evil, licensing resentment, dividing the world into oppressor and oppressed.
Now the honest line, because intellectual honesty is the whole point of using this framework rather than just swinging it as a club.
The lineage is partly direct and partly analogy. There is a real, traceable intellectual genealogy from the Frankfurt School through critical theory into the “critical” academic fields—that part is documented, not invented. But the leap from “these academic fields have Marxist roots” to “the entire cultural left is communism” is an overreach that collapses under scrutiny. Most people who hold broadly progressive views on identity have never read Marcuse and did not begin by seeking the abolition of private property. Shared rhetorical structure is not the same as shared program, but understanding that the critical school is a vehicle for everything that follows is important all the same. I say this because to address these issues with a progressive, you have to meet them where they are, not with mere refutations of Marcuse.
Second, there are orthodox Marxists who frequently reject the identity-focused left as a betrayal of Marxism, not a fulfillment of it. You don’t hear much from them, becasue cultural Marxism dominates the conversation, but they do exist. Classical Marxism is about class and material economics; it regards the focus on identity as a bourgeois distraction that fractures the working class and leaves capital untouched. It is not the same as “it’s all just communism,” and the stronger, sloppier version discredits the genuine insight.
So the defensible claim is this: what carries across all three phases is not a single economic program but a rhetorical and epistemological architecture—the false ethos of borrowed authority, the sealed and unfalsifiable logos of critique-without-construction, and the pathos of righteous grievance harnessed to a manufactured enemy. That architecture is portable. It has been fitted to class, then to culture, then to identity. And understanding the architecture is far more illuminating—and far more honest—than shouting “communism” at everything you dislike.
The Honest Counterpoints
A critique that only makes its own case is propaganda. So here, briefly, is the other side, because a reader deserves it.
Marx was a genuinely serious analyst of capitalism, and some of his descriptive insights—about the system’s tendency toward concentration, its recurrent crises (cycles), its transformation of social relations, the phenomenon of alienation in labor—are taken seriously even by people who reject his politics entirely. Dismissing all of it as mere manipulation underrates the real intellectual content, and underrating your opponent is itself a rhetorical failure.
The Frankfurt School produced real cultural analysis of lasting value, and “the culture industry” named something true about mass media. Their observations about cultural programming through media are apt. Not everything under the “critical” banner is unfalsifiable resentment; some of it is careful scholarship about genuine historical injustice.
And the deepest counterpoint: the emotions the whole tradition runs on are often responding to real things. There is real exploitation. There is real injustice, historical and present. The illegitimate pathos is often found in proportion. Should we be as angry today, specifically towards the cultures (UK and US) that ended it at great cost, at the evils of slavery, as we would have been as they happened? Proportion isn’t just about matching emotion to the weight of the issue, but also to the timing. Defining your entire worldview by grievances you never experienced is irrational.
Moreover, the suffering that fuels the pathos is frequently not manufactured at all—it’s the manufactured enemy and the sealed system that are the problem, not the underlying moral concern. A fair critic grants that the anger is often earned, and argues that it’s being misdirected—into an analysis that doesn’t hold and a politics that has, repeatedly and catastrophically, made things worse. That’s a much stronger claim than “these people are just resentful,” and it has the additional advantage of being true to the framework: good pathos, in service of bad logos, propped up by false ethos.
And that’s the analysis. I hope you have learned how to apply this engine to arguments over the past few weeks, and I hope this specific example gave you a playbook for applying it to other arguments, both good and bad.
The three appeals are a tool, not a weapon—and pointed at any total ideology, left or right, they reveal the same thing: watch where the authority is borrowed rather than earned, watch where the argument is sealed against refutation, and watch where the emotion is real but harnessed to a manufactured enemy. Finally, if someone is trying to rush you, they’re probably full of shit. A good argument can stand the test of time, but a bad one needs you to decide right now.
This piece uses the classical framework of ethos, logos, and pathos—the three appeals of persuasion—as an analytical tool. The same tool works on any ideology, and applying it to positions you already hold is a more demanding and more honest exercise than applying it only to positions you oppose.