MAGA Adopts One of Karl Marx’s Key Misconceptions

The MAGA movement’s views on low-wage labor echo the communist leader’s

Red scare. Does Donald Trump's MAGA movement hold Marxist beliefs on labor? Image Credit: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

“Globalization” has become a pretty notorious buzzword, and this can sometimes obscure the fact that it is largely (although not entirely) reducible to a set of private voluntary exchanges that occur across national borders. To the extent that President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement has consistent policy positions, those positions are predominantly about reducing globalization by preventing Americans from making voluntary transactions with those who lack U.S. citizenship—for example, tariffing imports to hinder U.S. citizens from engaging in international trade and barring commerce between U.S. citizens and many immigrants by detaining or deporting those immigrants or prohibiting their entry into the country.

When a government deploys mass coercion against peaceful people, as we have seen under Trump’s trade and immigration policies (which is not to say that all illegal immigrants are peaceful), the government’s representatives and apologists tend to roll out a series of moral justifications. These arguments can elucidate the character of the political faction in power, and MAGA has been no exception. Throughout the last few months, one of their defenses of Trump’s trade and immigration policies, contrary to the pre-MAGA Republican Party’s free market rhetoric, has frequently been the allegation that low wages for voluntary labor are exploitative.

One example comes from a recent CNN interview with Stephen Miller, Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff and Homeland Security Adviser. Anchor Jake Tapper told Miller, “The Department of Agriculture says that between 2020 and 2022, 42% of crop workers were undocumented immigrants. And in many cases, as you know, these migrants do jobs many Americans do not want to do. So,” Tapper asked, “how do you, how does President Trump, make sure that the effort to deport people who are not in this country legally doesn’t end up hurting Americans who ... don’t want to see even more higher prices in groceries?”

Implying that the undocumented crop workers are victimized by their positions in such jobs, Miller replied, “Well, I’m sure it’s not your position, Jake—you’re just asking the question—that we should supply America’s food with exploitative illegal alien labor.”

The idea that low wages for voluntary employment are exploitative is in line with the generally anti-market ethos that permeates MAGA’s stances against trade and immigration. But more specifically, it also coincides with the Marxist and socialist tradition that has gone further than any other to develop a sophisticated and complete repudiation of capitalism.

The Pundits Speak

Several popular MAGA media pundits go even further than Miller did on CNN, describing low wages for voluntary Chinese and illegal immigrant labor as not just exploitative but akin to enslavement.

The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh, the most successful political documentarian in two decades, invokes the slavery analogy in a response to U.S. Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett. Defending immigration based on “what immigrants do for this country,” the representative for Texas’s 30th congressional district had told an audience of presumably U.S. citizens, “The fact is ain’t none of y’all trying to go and farm right now. ... You’re not, you’re not. We done picking cotton. We are. You can’t pay us enough to find a plantation.” Walsh concluded from this: “So this is Jasmine Crockett openly admitting that they want illegal aliens in this country as slave labor. ... we now have Democrats just coming out and admitting that this is about slave labor. ... So, if you agree with that then congratulations, you’re pro-slavery.” He claims that, by contrast, he and others “who are opposed to illegal immigration” are “saying that we shouldn’t have an underclass of servants who we import to do menial labor that we don’t want to do.”

Similarly, bestselling author Michael Knowles argues that illegal immigrants “allow the elites to pay slave wages” and that immigration advocates want to pay immigrants “slave wages.” Knowles goes on: “The best argument the Democrats are making right now ... is that these illegal aliens need to be imported into the country so that they can work for very, very low wages that Americans won’t work for ... So hold on, your liberal bleeding-heart kumbaya humanitarian argument for mass migration is that we need to oppress the poor?” He admonishes the immigration advocates that, “Oppression of the poor is one of the four sins that cries out to heaven for vengeance.”

He makes similar arguments about the impact of international trade on Chinese labor. After declaring that “globalization is bad,” Knowles repeatedly stigmatizes globalization as pro-slavery, summarizing what he takes to be the agenda of globalism as, “We’re going to call the shots, we’re going to be running the companies, and we’re just going to have the slaves in China make the widgets.”

The popular MAGA podcast and radio pundit Benny Johnson also repeatedly analogizes cheap foreign labor to slavery—by, for example, accusing global trade of making Americans “completely and totally dependent upon slave labor peasants across Asia to make every good, service and pharmaceutical.”

MAGA Goes Marxist

Like the Marxists, MAGA thought leaders have the interests of low-wage laborers completely backwards when they use the language of “exploitation” to justify destroying the best financial opportunities those laborers have available to them.

The allegedly exploited and enslaved nature of wage labor under capitalist employment was popularized as a key aspect of Marxism. In his 1867 magnum opus “Capital,” Karl Marx uses the concepts of exploitation and enslavement to stigmatize the capitalist employment of wage labor. For example, in chapter 15, he writes:

In agriculture as in manufacture, the transformation of production under the sway of capital, means, at the same time, the martyrdom of the producer; the instrument of labour becomes the means of enslaving, exploiting, and impoverishing the labourer; the social combination and organisation of labour-processes is turned into an organised mode of crushing out the workman’s individual vitality, freedom, and independence.

His screed goes even further in chapter 25:

... within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital.

For Marx, “exploitation” is also a technical term. He defines “the degree of exploitation of labor” as “the rate of surplus-value” produced in capitalist firms. According to his labor theory of value, “surplus value” is the amount more that labor produces than it is paid in wages. In this framework, the larger the labor market is relative to capital, and the less beholden employers are to labor regulations such as minimum wage laws, the more “surplus value” (and therefore exploitation) can be produced, because under those conditions, wages can be lower relative to productivity. This would be the most robust theory on which to base suggestions that Chinese and illegal immigrant labor is particularly exploitative.

But this way of thinking about labor exploitation is fundamentally flawed. It rests on the misconception that capitalist enterprises are somehow crowding out better opportunities by offering wages for labor.

One possible source of this misconception is what economists call “the fixed pie fallacy.” This is the belief that resources and opportunities are preexisting rather than created, meaning that one entity having a larger share leaves less behind for others. Bellyaching over “exploitative” wages may arise from the belief that capitalist enterprises are created through privatization of previously commonly held resources. For example, the prominent Marxist professor Slavoj Žižek mistakenly holds this view, as I have explained elsewhere. On the contrary, as I discuss in that essay, free market capitalist enterprises are actually about investing to create new opportunities (for example, through innovation or technological advancement) where none previously existed. This is what characterizes them as free market and capitalist rather than socialist, corporatist, fascist or any other system of political economy based on expropriation and seizure of preexisting assets.

If it’s not the fixed pie fallacy leading Marxist or MAGA intellectuals to imagine capitalist enterprises crowding out better labor opportunities, then it is probably them conflating the productive capitalists with other factions that really do diminish the profitability of labor. While it is not the capitalist employers who impoverish workers, there are others—public policymakers—who do impoverish workers by implementing laws and regulations to prevent the free flow of labor and capital into its most productive uses.

Ironically, by advocating policies alleged to prevent exploitative labor conditions, it is precisely the likes of Miller, Walsh, Knowles and Johnson who would condemn laborers to much lower wages under worse circumstances. Illegal immigrants working for low wages in U.S. agriculture are typically in this country because they made an extreme effort to immigrate, in part because the low-paying jobs they voluntarily accept in the U.S., which improve the American economy, are better than the opportunities they had at home. The deportation of immigrants back to poorer countries, and the prevention of Chinese factory workers from accessing American markets, “rescue” workers from their preferred employment opportunities only by condemning them to return to the generally far worse labor conditions from which they deliberately came.

When Opportunity Knocks ... Shut the Door?

In their bestselling 2015 book “Equal Is Unfair: America’s Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality,” Yaron Brook and Don Watkins explain that the fight against low-wage Chinese labor should only be expected to leave Chinese workers with even worse opportunities:

No American would want to work in a Chinese factory eleven hours a day for $1.50 an hour. But that is because we have better opportunities available. The reason thousands of Chinese willingly flock to these “sweat shops” is because these are better opportunities than the alternatives that are open to them. ...

Research by economist Benjamin Powell ... found that “sweat shops” typically deliver a far higher standard of living than is available elsewhere in developing countries—sometimes as much as three times the average national income. ...

The lesson, Powell stresses, is that we can’t evaluate work opportunities in a given economy according to how they compare to the opportunities we have. We have to compare them to the next best alternatives that are actually available in those countries. Powell recounts how, in one famous 1993 case, “U.S. senator Tom Harkin proposed banning imports from countries that employed children in sweatshops. In response a factory in Bangladesh laid off 50,000 children. What was their next best alternative? According to the British charity Oxfam, a large number of them became prostitutes.”

“But why do so many people remain poor in a world that is so rich?” Brook and Watkins ask. “Often there is an injustice involved: individuals are oppressed through political power, and, as a result, they live in abject poverty, subsisting on as little as a dollar a day.” It is that sort of injustice, the kind of which trade and immigration restrictionism foment, that coercively withholds economic opportunity from the low-wage workers who need it most.

Now that radical political thought is reigniting and realigning on so many fronts, perhaps the MAGA intelligentsia has adopted some rhetorical tools from Marxism or Marx-adjacent movements because that is the tradition in which the most robust defenses of anti-market policy are available. Some of them may have genuinely become persuaded of these ideas, while others may be cynically attempting to use the language of leftism against the leftists. I have my doubts about the degree to which genuine concern over the exploitation of illegal immigrants and Chinese factory workers is really motivating their utterances. If it were, it is hard to imagine how they could have convinced themselves that a way to help low-wage farm workers is to ship them against their will to the impoverished countries from whence they voluntarily came.

Regardless of MAGA’s motivations, they use the same fallacious language as the Marxists by claiming that laborers who voluntarily accept employment opportunities are being unjustly treated by being given those options in addition to the options they already had. Those interested in the economic growth and resulting advancement of human flourishing that accrues to capitalist societies should not allow anti-market MAGA intellectuals to invoke false Marxist or Marx-adjacent premises unchallenged.