Marx Is Dead but His Middle Managers Are Thriving

America spent half the twentieth century terrified that communists were infiltrating the country, which was awkward because communists were, in fact, infiltrating the country.

This remains one of history’s more embarrassing complications.

The Soviet Union ran espionage networks inside the United States. American government employees passed information to Moscow. Soviet intelligence penetrated the Manhattan Project. The Communist International involved itself directly in American communist activity. VENONA eventually produced roughly 3,000 translated Soviet messages, including traffic concerning espionage and what the National Security Agency rather delicately calls the “treasonous activities” of government employees.

So the foundational problem with discussing communist infiltration in America is that two species of idiot immediately arrive carrying folding chairs.

Idiot One announces that communism never seriously penetrated American institutions and that the entire subject was invented by feverish men hallucinating Stalin inside the PTA.

Idiot Two announces that the assistant principal changing the school cafeteria menu is probably receiving instructions from the Kremlin.

Congratulations. Between you, historical literacy has been beaten unconscious behind a bowling alley.

Actual Soviet infiltration happened.

The State Department was complaining about Communist International involvement in American politics as early as 1934. Official diplomatic records described the Communist Party USA as the American section of the Communist International and documented Moscow meetings addressing communist activity inside the United States.

That matters.

It also matters that communism’s American story didn’t end when Americans stopped hiding microfilm in pumpkins and began hiding their political opinions from coworkers.

Because the most durable import wasn’t necessarily Soviet economic policy. America never abolished capitalism. We industrialized it, franchised it, gave it an app, and taught it to charge $19.99 a month for features your toaster performed free in 1978.

What survived far more successfully were certain habits of ideological thinking.

The individual becomes secondary to the category.

Disagreement becomes evidence of moral contamination.

Language becomes a jurisdiction.

Institutions acquire moral authority by declaring emergencies that conveniently require larger institutions.

Failure never disproves the theory because failure merely demonstrates insufficient commitment to the theory.

And an expanding professional priesthood emerges whose livelihood depends upon society remaining permanently guilty of something requiring professional supervision.

You don’t need a hammer and sickle for this.

A conference badge works beautifully.

That doesn’t mean every progressive idea is communism. It means authoritarian ideologies discovered intellectual tools that remain attractive long after people abandon the original ideology.

This distinction matters because screaming “MARXISM!” whenever the zoning board irritates you is how serious criticism becomes indistinguishable from medication-management issues.

Communism’s most successful descendants don’t necessarily own copies of Das Kapital. Many probably couldn’t survive twelve pages before checking Instagram.

They inherited something more practical than Marx.

They inherited the operating assumptions.

History has a direction. Virtuous people understand it. Institutions must accelerate it. Certain groups possess morally superior claims. Dissent obstructs progress. Language reveals allegiance. Neutrality conceals complicity. Every private sphere becomes political territory.

That intellectual machinery is incredibly seductive because it gives mediocre people something genius ordinarily requires years to acquire.

Certainty.

Suddenly Todd from Human Resources isn’t Todd from Human Resources.

Todd is History.

Todd has a slide deck.

Fear Todd.

Corporate America eventually figured this out too, because capitalism possesses the moral convictions of a Labrador standing beside an unattended ham.

If ideological vocabulary improves reputation, lowers political risk, attracts desirable employees, satisfies investors, or keeps activists occupied, corporations will manufacture moral enlightenment by the metric ton.

They’ll issue manifestos about liberation from buildings named after banks.

This is where the American story becomes uncomfortable.

Foreign ideology succeeds most easily when domestic institutions discover profitable reasons to metabolize it themselves.

Nobody had to parachute commissars onto Harvard Yard. American intellectuals were perfectly capable of finding fashionable theories without Soviet air support. Bureaucracies didn’t require Moscow to teach them bureaucratic self-preservation. Political activists didn’t require Lenin to discover that accusing opponents of moral depravity is easier than persuading them.

The Russians supplied espionage.

America supplied vanity.

And now China has discovered the twenty-first-century version.

The FBI says the Chinese government and Chinese Communist Party seek influence over lawmakers and public opinion while targeting businesses, universities, researchers and other American institutions. In February 2026, a California political operative was sentenced to four years in federal prison after pleading guilty to acting as an illegal PRC agent. Prosecutors said his activities included work connected to an American political campaign and coordination serving PRC interests.

Notice the sophistication.

A modern foreign adversary doesn’t have to persuade 330 million Americans to become communists.

That would require seminars, pamphlets, terrible coffee and several lifetimes.

It merely needs to understand American fractures, cultivate access, conceal relationships, exploit vanity, reward useful intermediaries and amplify existing conflict.

We’ll manufacture the outrage ourselves.

We have specialists.

So what do we actually do?

First, enforce foreign-agent disclosure laws aggressively and politically neutrally. FARA already exists specifically to expose certain relationships between foreign principals and people engaged in covered political activity inside the United States. Use it consistently. Republican influence operation, Democratic influence operation, environmental influence operation, corporate influence operation, peace-and-love influence operation conducted by a man named Rainbow Steve, same rules.

Second, make foreign institutional funding radically transparent. Universities already face federal foreign-gift and contract reporting requirements under Section 117. Strengthen compliance, improve public accessibility and make concealment expensive.

Third, teach communism honestly.

Teach Marx.

Teach Lenin.

Teach Stalin.

Teach the espionage.

Teach the attraction.

Teach the failures.

Teach why intelligent people believed.

Teach why other intelligent people resisted.

Teach enough intellectual history that twenty-year-olds stop discovering century-old ideas on TikTok and reacting like they’ve received tablets from Sinai.

Fourth, defend open argument ferociously.

A free society defeats authoritarian ideas by making them compete in public against criticism, evidence, ridicule and history. Suppressing discussion merely gives stupid ideas the erotic thrill of forbidden knowledge.

Finally, stop confusing vigilance with hysteria.

The United States doesn’t need another panic.

It needs adults capable of recognizing that foreign governments pursue influence, ideological movements seek institutional power, institutions protect themselves, citizens remain manipulable, and patriotism is considerably more demanding than attaching an American flag to your social-media biography.

The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

Communism lost its most spectacular superpower experiment.

Yet some of its intellectual machinery proved portable, adaptable and astonishingly compatible with people who would burst into flames if asked to surrender their Amazon Prime membership.

The Reds lost.

America kept parts of the user manual.

And somewhere, history is laughing hard enough to require medical attention.

Practical reforms worth doing

1. Apply FARA consistently across parties, causes and industries.
2. Strengthen disclosure of foreign funding flowing into universities, think tanks, advocacy organizations and politically active entities.
3. Increase counterintelligence resources aimed at covert foreign political influence while explicitly rejecting ethnicity-based suspicion.
4. Declassify historically significant counterintelligence material whenever national-security concerns permit it.
5. Require public institutions to distinguish compulsory ideological conformity from legitimate professional standards.
6. Expand serious instruction in communist history, authoritarian political systems, propaganda and foreign influence methods.
7. Protect vigorous disagreement rather than treating dissent as an administrative defect.

References

For anyone who suspects history began when they downloaded their first social-media app, several government agencies have thoughtfully preserved documents.

NSA VENONA Documents
https://www.nsa.gov/Helpful-Links/NSA-FOIA/Declassification-Transparency-Initiatives/Historical-Releases/Venona/

FBI In the Enemy’s House, Venona and American Counterintelligence
https://www.fbi.gov/history/history-publications-reports/in-the-enemys-house-venona-and-the-maturation-of-american-counterintelligence

U.S. Department of State Historical Documents on Communist International Activity in the United States
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1933-39/d139

FBI The China Threat
https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/counterintelligence/the-china-threat

Department of Justice 2026 PRC Illegal Agent Sentencing
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/political-operative-sentenced-48-months-federal-prison-acting-covert-agent-peoples-republic

Department of Justice Foreign Agents Registration Act
https://www.justice.gov/nsd-fara

U.S. Department of Education Section 117 Foreign Gift and Contract Reporting
https://fsapartners.ed.gov/knowledge-center/topics/section-117-foreign-gift-and-contract-reporting/published-guidance

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Tammy Pondsmith regards institutional piety as cosplay for cowards, considers jargon the mating call of the professionally unaccountable, and remains the apex predator of people whose credentials enter the room ten minutes before their evidence.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.