A Specter Is Haunting America’s New Right

Marxism in any form should be consigned to the dustbin of history

Letter to The WSJ. 

"Jacob Berger suggests that a subtle philosophical kinship links the Trump movement to an unlikely ally, Karl Marx (“Why MAGA Folks Should Read Marx,” Review, Jan. 25). He detects an anticapitalist undercurrent in the MAGA movement and suggests the right’s economic anxieties make them receptive to Marx’s doctrines.

Mr. Berger’s diagnosis contains a kernel of truth, but his proposed solution of studying Marx assumes that Marx offered a useful solution to economic problems. As most economists have known since the late 19th century, Marx built his system on an erroneous theory of value. He prophesied the coming immiseration of the working classes under a perpetual state of capitalist exploitation, making violent revolution their only recourse. Instead, industrial capitalism delivered an unprecedented rise in living conditions and economic abundance for the masses.

Marx owes his salience today not to the validity of his theories but to the fluke success of the Bolshevik coup d’état in 1917. Vladimir Lenin rescued Marxism from a state of relative obscurity and absolute economic error, then deployed the full resources of the Soviet treasury to spread its gospel. Yet as Friedrich Hayek observed, Marx’s doctrine “has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement.” Instead, the intellectual elites in university humanities departments took up the charge and presumed to speak on behalf of a working class they barely knew.

By reading “Das Kapital” (1867) certain “postliberal” intellectuals on the right will almost certainly find commonalities with the Marxist left’s disdain for capitalism. But that disdain is still the product of what John Maynard Keynes described as “an obsolete textbook . . . without interest or application for the modern world.”

Phillip W. Magness

The Independent Institute

Oakland, Calif."