Yes, Lina Khan Is a Marxist

With the announcement that former Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan will serve as co-chair of the transition team for New York City mayor-elect and self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” Zohran Mamdani, others and I have noted the overlap between this ideology and Khan’s own neo-Brandeisian approach to antitrust. At one level, this should not be surprising in the least: Like any other politician, Mayor-elect Mamdani is not likely to appoint people to lead his transition team who do not broadly share his democratic socialist worldview. Equally unsurprisingly, others, such as former Marxist and unabashed New Dealer Sohrab Ahmari, were quick to defend Khan from the charge of socialism, writing that unlike Khan, “Marxists aren’t worried about the size of enterprise and, in fact, welcome big-ness.”

There are several salient features of Khan’s neo-Brandeisian worldview that make it worthy of the “Marxist” appellation. First, Marx and Khan both utilize a model of class conflict as the rhetorical centerpiece of their respective theories. For Marx, this conflict is between labor and capital, with the capitalists exploiting the proletariat through the alienation of labor. For Khan, this class conflict expands to pit the petit bourgeoisie and small businesses against the haute bourgeoisie and big business, which through their scale are said to engage in a similar form of exploitation against their smaller rivals. In other words, neo-Brandeisianism seeks to enlist the petit bourgeoisie to join the proletariat in overthrowing capitalist society.

Lest one think that Khan is only trying to save capitalism from the capitalists, it is not hard to see that, like Marx, she is anything but a believer in the workings of free markets. In contrast to the founder of capitalism himself, Adam Smith—who viewed the market as a natural order that, when left alone, generally cohered with the common good—Khan has called for “denaturalising what can so often be described as the product of metaphysical forces” and views the role of government as “shaping markets and economic outcomes.” For Marx, the prescription was essentially the same: Left to its own devices, capitalism embodies economic instabilities that will lead to its demise.

The similarities do not end there. Essential to both Marx’s and Khan’s ideologies is the recognition of, and resultant hostility toward, technological change as a mechanism that facilitates so-called capitalist exploitation. Specifically, just as Marx believed that capitalists extract surplus value from labor by employing innovations that reduce the demand for labor, Khan and the neo-Brandeisians argue that the digital revolution has led to increased concentration across the economy, squeezing out opportunities for small businesses. However, as ITIF has found, this allegation is belied by the facts showing that U.S. industries have not experienced any meaningful increase in concentration.

Marx and Khan also rely on accompanying theories of accumulation to explain how the capitalist “enemy” acquires power. For Marx, this process involves capitalists taking more and more surplus value from labor and reinvesting profits in technological improvements in ways that increase the value and returns to capital relative to labor. With Khan, an analogous dialectic is deployed, most visibly in the context of the digital markets that are the subject of her greatest opprobrium. Just like the industrial capitalist of old, by competing and gaining more users, the digital capitalist increases its market power through network effects that, in Khan’s words, ultimately “yield to dominance by a small number of firms.”

To be sure, Khan’s penchant for small business does not make her a “socialist” in the sense of favoring a powerful centralized state to succeed capitalism, whether democratic or tyrannical in its political orientation. However, contrary to Ahmari’s suggestion, the evolution of Marxist thought makes clear that socialism is but an intermediate step between capitalism and the desired communist utopia. Indeed, in this latter system, neo-Brandeisian-style worker-based decentralization approximates the organizational ideal that emerges after the socialist superstate withers away and is replaced by what later Marxists describe as an “association of free and equal producers,” in which the “producers themselves, in their own right, have control over management and administration” of the means of production.

Of course, and again in contrast with textbook Marxism, the neo-Brandeisian program is not defined by a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism but by an incrementalist, or more “Fabian,” approach. Khan and the neo-Brandeisians seek to utilize key relations of capitalist production—and, in particular, antitrust law—to undermine capitalism from within. Indeed, this is inherent in the neo-Brandeisian notion that antitrust laws should promote “competition” as a means to advance decentralized market structures in themselves. It is further evidenced by their weaponization of antitrust institutions well beyond their authority, most notably invalidating approximately 30 million private employer-employee agreements under the guise of the FTC’s alleged authority to issue rulemakings for unfair methods of competition.

At bottom, the neo-Brandeisian movement cleverly repackages Marxist ideology under the guise of antitrust. While often proclaiming to be defenders of capitalism and the “little guy,” in reality they represent a neo-Marxist vanguard trying to galvanize the petit bourgeoisie to join them in overthrowing Western capitalism through a de facto communist-like system—using the incrementalist stratagem of subverting core capitalist institutions like antitrust, a hammer through which they can drive a Marxist sickle into the heart of the American free enterprise system, especially its leading technology companies. While they no longer retain power at the federal antitrust agencies, the adoption of the neo-Brandeisian ideology by the broader progressive movement makes clear that the spectre of these “antitrust Marxists” remains an ongoing threat that demands continued vigilance.