Responses: Paul Berman

I have no particular quarrel with Stanley Hoffmann’s comments, not even with the one endorsing a “free enterprise system” in Russia. But since Dissent is a journal of the left, allow me to exhume an additional point from the ancient casket of Marxist theory.

The core of modern left-wing thinking about foreign policy has always been (or imagined itself to be) moral. If you accept—as many people used to do—Marx’s labor theory of value, you must also accept a corollary added by Lenin in 1916. To wit: the wealth of the wealthy nations derives from the super-exploitation of colonized labor (thus forestalling the business disaster that would otherwise result from the falling rate of profit, as per Marx’...