One of the more regrettable developments in recent years is a resurgence of interest in the ideas of Karl Marx. For example, Matt McManus published an article earlier this year at Quillette about “Why We Should Read Marx.” More recently, Ben Burgis published an article at Arc Digital defending Marx’s theory of exploitation. These essays, by intelligent and thoughtful philosophy professors whose political sympathies align with Marx’s critique of capitalism, comport with what Quillette editor Toby Young calls a neo-Marxist takeover of our universities. Indeed, as tabulated by Phillip W. Magness, Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research: “…as of 2015 Marx stands nearly alone as the most frequently assigned author in American college classrooms, only surpassed by the ubiquitous Strunk and White grammar manual.” 

This resurgence parallels the political traction gained by democratic socialism, Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as the popularity of left-wing journalistic outlets like Current Affairs and Jacobin magazine, the latter a quarterly print magazine with 50,000 subscribers, and an online “audience of over 2,000,000 a month,” and as a Google search indicates, a venue which adamantly endorses a Marxist worldview. In the aftermath of the Great Recession, this interest in Marx is perhaps unsurprising, similar to how the Great Depression fostered skepticism about the virtues of capitalism. Nonetheless, it is apparent that the end of the Cold War—and the booming nineties—were not the death knell for Marxism they once seemed to be. 

At its core, Marxism is a theory of exploitation. “Capitalism” is purportedly characterized by an irrepressible class conflict between “capitalists” and “laborers”: between those who own the “means of production” and those who do not. As owners of the means of production, “capitalists” set the terms of production and employment. They hire workers to work the machines, deliberately minimizing wages to maximize profit. Laborers capitulate because selling their labor is their only way to survive. They are set “free” into the wilderness of “capitalism” and quickly realize they must yoke themselves to the iron law of M – C – M’, turning money (M) into commodities (C) and commodities into more money (M’). The world is divided between rich fat cats sitting on a pile of gold, deploying their riches to reel in poor hungry souls who sadly (but helplessly) surrender their capacity for labor to the commodification of life in the service of profit accumulation. 

When capitalists sell commodities to workers at a profit, workers confront their externalized labor as a hostile force. False consciousness keeps workers oblivious to their alienation, while the M – C – M’ cycle of surplus value creation churns on, further enriching capitalists while the masses of workers earn wages not high enough to afford all the commodities they are conditioned to fetishize. Inevitably, after repeated crises resulting from the inherent contradictions spawned by high prices and low wages, workers will awaken from false consciousness and revolt, pulling down capitalists from atop their piles of gold and democratically deciding how to spread the wealth.