Agitprop - Stolen Wage Edition

When you spend as much time playing in the political sandbox as I do, you are bound to notice patterns and trends. Certain themes and narratives pop up, everywhere all at once, and become the fashionable arguments of the moment. For the longest time I’ve been operating under the assumption that they’ve had their origins in the kombucha filled rooms of the New York Times and other leftist taste-making nodes, but recent revelations as to the extent of foreign propaganda campaigns has me realizing that this isn’t just the result of a bunch of ivory tower dimwits who fancy themselves the intellectual elite engaging in circle jerks and leaking it out to the Orwellian sheep who eagerly wait to be told what to regurgitate.

Source notwithstanding, it is a reality of our modern times that social media is the preferred playground for promulgators of what was dubbed “agitprop” a century ago. Agitprop is defined as the use of popular media to aggressively spread political messages and ideas. That those messages and ideas are rehashes of old failures, or deceptions, or outright lies, doesn’t matter. The end goal is political influence in pursuit of power.

And it’s working.

Ideas that belong in the dustbin of history are back, with a vengeance.

One I’m sure you’ve seen - and if you haven’t, will see soon enough - is the ‘stolen wage’ critique of capitalism. As part of a broader campaign against the successful, with “billionaires” standing in for everyone who has built a business or amassed a body of wealth, online critics claim that capitalism in practice relies on stealing the fruit of workers’ labor. That business owners make money by underpaying their employees, who are the ones who create all the value. That profit is solely derived from the labor that goes into a product.

This is known as the Labor Theory of Value (LTV), an idea promoted by Karl Marx. It’s a garbage theory that’s been broadly debunked, and supplanted by the concept of marginal utility. I won’t deep-dive into the debunking here for brevity - you can find plenty with a simple Internet search.

Unfortunately, it’s back, in a grossly simplified, almost child-like form that ignores capital investment needs and economic risk, among other realities. But, because it is simple and superficially about “fairness,” and pits the rich against everyone else, it appeals to the young and emotional, so it’s an easy seed to plant and an easy wedge to drive.

Because social media insulates people from the normal feedback mechanisms that face-to-face interactions offer (including shame at saying something stupid), people are far more apt to get righteous in repeating “stolen wage” nonsense on the Internet. So, now, it’s infesting every political page I see.

Repeat a lie often enough, and people start to believe there must be a kernel of truth to it. That is the argumentum ad populum fallacy, or the “illusion of truth” we are prone to falling for. The propagandizers who are behind this and other “everywhere all at once” agitprops know this all too well.

Our first defense is to recognize them for what they are. Our second defense is offense: call it out, tear it down, and name it for the Marxist garbage that it is. It’s a tough battle against an insidious, relentless, and deep-pocketed foe wholly intent on tearing down the very fabric of our liberty-based society.