I’ve been thinking a lot about why reading something like Marx’s Communist Manifesto feels so different from cracking open Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. On the surface, both tackle economic and social systems, but the vibes couldn’t be more different. Marx’s work hits like a sermon, full of prophecy and moral fire, while Smith’s feels like a dry lecture you’d get in an econ 101 class. It dawned on me that communism reads more like a religious text than a work of social science, and I think it’s worth unpacking why that is. Let’s dive into the rhetoric, structure, and purpose behind these works to see what’s going on.
Start with Marx’s Manifesto. The moment you read that opening line—“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”—you’re not just getting an analysis; you’re being swept into a grand narrative. Marx paints history as an epic, almost cosmic battle between the oppressed proletariat and the exploitative bourgeoisie, with a predestined endpoint: the working class will rise, overthrow their oppressors, and create a classless utopia where the state just “withers away.” That’s not a hypothesis you can test with data—it’s a prophecy, delivered with absolute certainty. The language is charged with moral urgency, casting capitalism as an evil force, a “vampire” sucking the life from workers, while the proletariat becomes a virtuous, almost messianic group destined to redeem society. It’s hard not to see the parallels with religious texts like the Bible, where history unfolds as part of a divine plan, leading to salvation for the faithful and judgment for the wicked. Marx isn’t just describing how economies work; he’s telling you how they should work, rallying you to join the cause with lines like “Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!” That’s not the voice of a scientist—it’s the voice of a preacher, stirring your emotions, demanding your faith.
Now flip to Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, and the contrast is stark. Smith isn’t trying to inspire a revolution or promise a paradise. He’s observing the world around him—18th-century Britain, with its trade routes and early industries—and breaking down how economies function. He talks about the division of labor, using the example of a pin factory to show how specialization boosts productivity, and explains how self-interest drives markets through the “invisible hand.” There’s no moral crusade here. Smith doesn’t cast the butcher or baker as villains for wanting profit; he sees their choices as natural, even beneficial, because they lead to more goods for everyone. His prose is dense and technical, focused on specifics like how wool gets from a farm to a market, not on stirring your soul. Where Marx prophesies a transformative future, Smith sticks to describing the present, offering no utopian endpoint—just a system that adapts to human behavior. It’s a work of observation and reason, not a call to action or belief.
This difference in tone ties to their deeper purposes. Marx wrote in the 19th century, a time when traditional religion was losing its grip in Europe, especially among the working class battered by the Industrial Revolution. Communism stepped into that void, offering a secular faith with all the trappings of religion: a chosen people in the proletariat, a devil in capitalism, and a promised land in the classless society. It gave the downtrodden a mission—overthrow the system—and a sense of community through class solidarity, complete with rituals like rallies and manifestos, and even martyrs in the form of revolutionary heroes. The Manifesto isn’t just a text; it’s a declaration meant to convert, to bind people together under a shared vision. That’s why it demands belief in its core ideas, like the labor theory of value or the inevitability of class conflict, with little room for skepticism. In practice, this turned into outright dogma—think of how communist regimes like Stalin’s purged “deviationists” who questioned the party line, not unlike religious purges of heretics.
Smith, writing a century earlier during the Enlightenment, comes from a different world. His work reflects the era’s obsession with reason and empirical inquiry. He’s not trying to replace religion or rally a movement—he’s dissecting how wealth is created, using concrete examples like trade patterns and production methods. His ideas are open to scrutiny; later economists like Ricardo or Keynes built on or challenged them, treating The Wealth of Nations as a starting point, not a sacred text. Smith focuses on individual agency, showing how people’s rational choices—pursuing their own gain—lead to broader benefits, without subsuming them into a collective struggle. There’s no grand destiny, no heroes or villains, just a pragmatic look at how markets coordinate human activity.
Another layer to this is how each handles evidence and complexity. Marx constructs his narrative by cherry-picking history to fit his dialectic—feudalism to capitalism to socialism—while glossing over counterexamples or the messy realities of human behavior. His labor theory of value, which says workers produce all value, ignores the role of capital or innovation, and economists have poked holes in it for over a century. Yet within communism, these ideas often stand as doctrine, not theories to be tested. Smith, for all his flaws (he didn’t foresee the Industrial Revolution’s scale), grounds his work in what he sees—specific industries, trade flows, market behaviors. His method is empirical, inviting correction with new evidence, which is the hallmark of social science.
At its core, communism reads like a religious text because it’s built to inspire faith, not just impart knowledge. It offers a moral saga, complete with a savior, a villain, and a utopia, all wrapped in emotive, absolute language that hits you in the heart. Smith’s work, by contrast, is a study—detached, technical, and focused on mechanics, not meaning. Marx calls you to believe and act; Smith asks you to observe and think. That’s the gulf between scripture and science.
