Over the course of the summer, we’ve seen a sharp increase in conservatives’ use and abuse of the term “Marxism.” They are incapable of defining it, but it’s usually clear from the context that their usage is intended to scare, particularly to tie all socialists, progressives, and even liberals to what they perceive to be a legacy of totalitarianism and terror.

The Right’s understanding of Marxism is so off base that reasoned debate about the actual meaning of Marxism seems impossible. Which isn’t what they’re interested in, anyway — their aim is to use Marxism as a cudgel to smash progressive political projects of any kind. But as Kristen Ghodsee and Scott Sehon argued to Jacobin’s Micah Uetricht and Meagan Day, we shouldn’t gloss over this dynamic or shrug it off just because it’s absurd.

Instead, we should attempt to understand what ideology is really being mobilized by it and to what ends. That ideology is anti-communism, which is a set of assumptions and false equivalences that has been shored up for decades. As Ghodsee and Sehon argued in a 2018 Aeon essay, its purpose is “to ensure that calls for social justice or redistribution are forever equated with forced labour camps and famine.”