Jordan Peterson loves to talk about Karl Marx. Even his book of self-help advice, 12 Rules for Life, includes surprisingly extensive rants about Marx, Marxism, communism, and something called “postmodern neo-Marxism.” He blames Karl Marx and his ideas for everything from the alleged corrupting influence of postmodernism on Western society to the horrors of the Khmer Rouge. It’s one of his favorite subjects.

Oddly enough, then, he never seems to have bothered to read much Marx. Three years ago, Peterson debated the Slovenian Marxist thinker Slavoj Žižek in Toronto. In his opening statement, before Žižek had said a word, Peterson made an astonishing admission. He said he’d just now, in preparation for the debate, read The Communist Manifesto for the first time since he was eighteen years old.

Let that sink in. The Communist Manifesto is a very short pamphlet. You can read it in one afternoon with time to burn. And Peterson hadn’t read even that at any point in the last forty years. It’s a safe bet that he wasn’t poring through Marx’s discussion of the falling rate of profit in Capital, Volume III at any point during those decades either.