The Marxian Roots of Campus Anti-Semitism – WSJ

Where are the campus protests against Chinese concentration camps in Xinjiang? Governments brutalize citizens in Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria and many other places, but this week s campus demonstrators bring their placards to the quadrangle only against the Jewish state.

That anti-Israel protests erupted on elite campuses this week not after the accidental killing of a Palestinian demonstrator but after the systematic murder of at least 1,300 people in Israel signifies an egregious failure at the heart of American higher education. That so many students and academics could think this was a proper response to an act of mass murder suggests something deeply amiss on our campuses. What we are witnessing is the fruition, many decades in the making, of a habit of mind that can accurately be called Marxian.

It was Karl Marx who, in Das Kapital, first argued that the wage earner in a capitalist economy never works for himself but only for the owner of the means of production. The capitalist appropriated as profit his surplus labor that is, work beyond what was necessary to keep the operation going. The taking of surplus labor Marx called exploitation. This little idea that the wealthy capitalist makes his millions by expropriating what rightly belongs to the worker cast a spell on the minds of 19th- and early-20th-century radical intellectuals. It was a total misunderstanding of economic value, and philosophically it was akin to saying up is down or blue is red nonsense in practice, but in theory who could contradict it?

Notwithstanding many dauntless efforts over several generations to defend regulated market economies as just, the belief that profit is theft, that prosperity under capitalism is taken from the poor laborer by force, is so much a part of today s left-progressive mindset as to be unquestioned and immovable. The entire social justice movement is premised on the belief that if one group does well and another doesn t, the former must have taken advantage of the latter a thousand explanatory circumstances be damned. (See Thomas Sowell s latest book, Social Justice Fallacies, for a brilliant treatment of the subject.) You can hear Marx s concept of exploitation in Sen. Elizabeth Warren s constant assertion that successful corporations and wealthy Americans have somehow gamed the system at the expense of the poor and middle class.

via www.wsj.com

Barton Swaim.

I would only add that Senator Warren became very wealthy (est. net worth $73 million) *after* she took office, so she is an ultimate rent-seeker — beyond hypocritical.