Lo, the irony: from the company that famously once decried that passive investing is worse than Marxism comes a pair of index-based exchange-traded funds.

Wall Street research firm Bernstein on Tuesday debuted the Bernstein U.S. Research Fund (BERN) and Bernstein Global Research Fund (BRGL) that track indexes filled with stocks rated “outperform” by the company’s research analysts and ranked most attractive in the firm’s quantitative alpha model.

Bernstein, known to many investors as the investment research shop Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., is a subsidiary of AB, formerly known as AllianceBernstein. According to fund literature related to the two new ETFs, Bernstein is consistently rated as the top-ranked Wall Street research firm for securities in both the U.S. and Europe. The company aims to translate its investing acumen to success in ETF Land.

The Bernstein ETFs blend a mix of active and passive features—the former based on the stock ratings set by the firm’s research analysts; and the latter because those calls are packaged into equal-weighted indexes that are rebalanced monthly.

In August 2016, Bernstein strategist Inigo Fraser-Jenkins caused a stir with his paper entitled The Silent Road to Serfdom: Why Passive Investing Is Worse Than Marxism. He argued that while passive investing has benefitted investors by creating lower-cost products, it has created dangerous side effects by making asset allocation decisions based on the financial economy.

On the other hand, he argued, active management is about focusing on business fundamentals in the real economy. “[A] supposedly capitalist economy, where the only investment is passive, is worse than either a centrally planned economy or an economy with active-market-led capital management,” he wrote.

In essence, the two new Bernstein ETFs add a new twist to the active vs. passive debate. And they do so at a price point that's relatively in line with other ETFs that incorporate elements of active investing—a 0.50 percent expense ratio for the Bernstein U.S. Research Fund and a 0.65 percent expense ratio for the Bernstein Global Research Fund.

Both funds trade on the Bats exchange, and were launched with the help of Exchange Traded Concepts, a private-label ETF advisor whose turnkey platform helps bring ETFs to market more quickly and less costly than doing it from scratch.