Marxism has become a catch-all accusation, but the real problem is not rhetorical excess—it is analytical failure. While Marx was a stimulating philosopher, his economic claims do not withstand modern theory or empirical scrutiny. Contemporary academic Marxism survives not because it explains economic reality well, but because it offers moral gratification detached from falsifying facts.

There are better, and especially more precise ways of understanding economic problems that he tried to analyze. Economic core theory is a mathematical model that demonstrates how social cooperation yields more efficient outcomes than competition in certain markets, such as public utilities. Unfortunately, many academics now favor emotional gratification over technical understanding—and Marxism ultimately undermines both intellectual clarity and analytic rigor.

Marxism naturally leads to what Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises called “socialist destructionism” —the belief that the destruction of capital and property is itself socially valuable. The “Summer of 2020” riots are a contemporary example. This idea, however, has a long pedigree within Marxism. A central slogan of Marxism-Leninism from the 1917 Revolution through the early decades of Soviet propaganda captured the same logic: “Через Обломки Капитализма к Всемирному Братству Трудящикся!”—“Through the wreckage of capitalism to the world brotherhood of workers.” The slogan was not merely rhetorical; it coincided with campaigns of expropriation and the execution of white Russian anti-Bolshevik leaders, giving concrete political expression to the doctrine of destruction as progress.

In a previous article, I criticized the University of Chicago Law School (UChicago Law) for effectively endorsing this ideology. Like many progressive universities—Yale, Berkeley, Columbia, and Harvard among them—UChicago has been culturally “imprinted” by progressive, sometimes radicalized political figures, including former presidents who later served as lecturers or remained influential alumni.

These lingering impressions among university faculty and students are heavily shaped by progressive ideology. As San Francisco State University international relations scholar Andrei Tsygankov observes, this ideology is not only readily absorbed into academia but also irrationally generalized to entire cultures, including a “destructionism” directed at entire countries. It can become a form of mass psychosis. Universities rarely correct this kind of ideological escalation because their administrative structures are themselves grounded in progressive perspectives and interests.

At UChicago Law, this includes a recent national conference that carefully claimed an effective mandate to frustrate conservative policy. Not to be outdone, the university recently invited Lea Ypi, a Marxist academic from the London School of Economics—the same institution that trained George Soros and other Fabian socialists—to lecture on the “evils” of capitalism as part of its annual James Dewey Lecture. Ypi harbors a pitched, emotional resentment of American wealth. Her “policy” solution is simply to take private property from individuals and give it to those she deems deserving, including millions of “exploited” illegal immigrants.

In her UChicago Law lecture, she framed her policy in abstract, labored philosophical language, without demonstrating an understanding of basic definitions and meanings of the economic subject she criticizes. She creates a campus discourse that is neither conceptually rigorous nor intellectually precise, thereby demonstrating another example of the logical problem of induction. This is exactly the problem that economist W.W. Rostow noted in his book, The Stages of Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto. That is, Marx operates by making systematic generalizations from limited personal observations. This includes unsupported generalizations: that all capitalists are the same, that all capitalism is identical, and that losses of freedom and agency are uniform across a supposedly homogeneous class. It is pure Marxism. As a law argument, it suffers from 1950s academic jurisprudence that popularized the notion that the law’s ideal purpose is to advance social welfare. As a philosophical argument, it also degrades the analytic standards of philosophical inquiry from those established by more serious philosophers, such as Alfred North Whitehead:

Philosophy is not a collection of sentiments. A deluge of sentiments does more harm than good. Philosophy is a survey of possibilities and their comparison with actualities. The fact, the theory, the alternatives, and the ideal, are weighed together. Its gifts are insight and foresight, and the sense of importance which serves civilized effort.

Perhaps the most obvious is Ypi’s failure to adequately define capitalism. From an academic philosophy perspective, she has framed capitalism strictly in social-class terms and labor theories. (A recent Nobel recipient at MIT, Daron Acemoglu, who heads up the Stone Center for Inequality, also makes the same mistake, as I pointed out in the FT). 

Capitalism is defined in mechanical terms: it refers to the relationship between cost and price and demonstrates how financial margins can produce rates of return that enable the continuous reinvestment of compounded surplus, thereby creating the wealth on which socialism depends. As Hoover Institution economist Thomas Sowell stated, the progressive political worldview fails to identify where and how wealth is produced and how it thereby provides all economic benefits assigned to welfare and state purposes. But capitalism also carries an explicit assumption of efficiency. As UChicago economist Robert Topel calculated, government waste is so high that the ratio of tax revenue to benefit can exceed 250:1. That is, it takes $250 of tax revenue to make $1 dollar of purported benefit. If Marxists, like Ypi, faced these facts—that government destroys capital—they might understand, and convey to students, that capitalism contains an economic efficiency rule that serves citizens, and effective government. 

Interestingly, a lecture by a Dartmouth professor offered an example of how to think more carefully about Marxist speculation and directly refuted Ypi’s speculations. It was an example of more mature thinking and better teaching:

It’s fashionable to argue that capitalism is alienating, because markets’ reliance on extrinsic incentives, instrumental valuation, and commodity exchange make our social and political order confront us as something hostile or out of step with important ethical values. The problem is that these arguments overgeneralize. The alienating features of markets allow them to overcome the information costs and free-rider problems that undermine large-scale cooperation. This is also true of bureaucracy, which is both historically and theoretically the most common alternative to market organization. In both cases, scalability explains alienation. Often, alienation theorists turn to democracy as a paradigmatically non-alienating governance mechanism. However, the features that make democracy non-alienating also leave it vulnerable to information costs and free-rider problems. Alienation theorists thus face a challenge. They must describe a non-alienated social relation that can overcome the problems that undermine large-scale cooperation. The prospects seem dim. Some amount of alienation may just be an inevitable drawback of our political arrangements.

By drawing its adherents into an imaginary world detached from learning and verification, Marxism undermines academic integrity. Unfortunately, the university concept generally relies on an idealized conception that is vulnerable when it is untethered from empirical facts. This is why science advances by correcting mistakes resulting from collisions with reality. Marxism ignores reality, including its own veiled pretension to absolute social control. The business school model generally outperforms its academic rivals intellectually because it is inherently tied to the reality of people acting in actual exchange markets, and it measures and reports the benefits. It is no coincidence that Marxism cannot find a footing in schools of commerce. Marx would have learned much about capitalism, and his Manifesto might have had a very different character had he worked as a tradesman or laborer. He would have found that there are no “Marxist” banks, or Marxist restaurants, gas stations, dairy farms, garbage services, or Marxist lawn care businesses or Marxist home builders. There are merely Marxist governments that tax, obstruct, and regulate. (New York City’s new Marxist mayor is operating precisely on this principle.)

Marx was a Ph.D. student in philosophy and an admirer of Hegel’s system, which developed philosophical idealism at German universities. This may be one reason “STEM” has such modern currency: it is tied to real work. The irony of Marxism is that its labor theory of value ignores the work theory of learning. Marx assumes a labor function with no actual intellectual and human growth component. This is why Rostow’s “stages” of growth were inherently anti-Marxist because they rested on successive human learning, innovation, and economic growth.

University professors might keep this in mind.