Months after its release, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is still getting praised in reviews and sitting near the top of bestseller charts. If the invisibility of a system is a marker of its ideological success, this can’t be a good sign for capitalism.

It’s no surprise that people are curious about the causes of the injustice that surrounds them. Average workers’ wages in the US have fallen sizably from 2007 to 2012; in the same period, over 90 percent of all new income went to the top 1 percent; while around 46 million Americans live in poverty, the gap between corporate profits and workers’ wages has never been greater. Piketty’s conclusion that capitalism, if left unchecked, generates a concentration of wealth among a tiny minority sits well with this lived experience.

Merit or hard work, the standard justification for inequality, has little to do with our new gilded age.

Though he distances himself from the old man, Piketty’s analyses have been aligned in a certain sense with those of Marx. Not surprisingly, the response to the book has revealed some central misconceptions embedded in critiques of Marxism.

Here it becomes clear that invisibility is not the only weapon in the ideological arsenal of capitalism. The first line of right-wing defense is denial, with some variation on the contention that the state of the economy is fine, thank you. There may be inequality, as Scott Winship or Kevin Hasset would argue, but it’s not actually harmful. They are drawing on the ideological conviction that capitalism left to its own devices rewards the meritorious and is beneficial not just for capitalists but for everyone.

Unfortunately for them, Piketty does not simply make a counterclaim; he demonstrates with irrefutable data that the cherished faith in this dual doctrine of capitalism — of the natural and just creation of a meritocracy whose resultant inequality benefits all — is simply false. This is why what Paul Krugman calls the “Piketty panic” sets in, and they move to the second line of defense.

Piketty’s naysayers make a claim that is powerful in its aged simplicity: Money doesn’t matter. It is not inequality that generates unhappiness, but a lack of communitarian possibilities. Notice that they don’t question the fact of inequality or even that it might cause unhappiness, but as Megan McArdle insists, “[T]he proportion of this unhappiness due to income inequality is actually relatively small.”

Instead, McArdle contends in her review of Piketty’s book — which she admits to not have read — that what is needed “is the sense that you can plan for a decent life filled with love and joy and friendship, then send your children on to a life at least as secure and well-provisioned as your own.”

In a marginally more sophisticated review, Ross Douthat similarly argues that the resurrection of Marx won’t bring much comfort because what is amiss in contemporary capitalist societies is not the lack of economic security, but the erosion of “cultural identity — family and faith, sovereignty and community . . . forms of solidarity that give meaning to life for many people, while offering nothing but money in their place.”

Easy leftist dismissals of such idealistic positions are not necessarily helpful. The reason arguments disavowing the connection between money and happiness have such a lasting appeal is because there is a kernel of truth to them. The realization of human potential and happiness is much more intricately connected with creativity, art, science, myriad cultural practices, and forms of solidarity and community rather than materiality.

But here’s the thing — Marx would wholeheartedly agree! The moral power of Marx’s work doesn’t just derive from its systematic demystification of capitalism; it also flows from his insistence that capitalism cannot generate the conditions for human flourishing. He never equated material well-being with happiness, but he knew that there can be no happiness without material well-being.

The crime of capitalism is that it forces the vast majority of the population to remain preoccupied with basic concerns of nutrition, housing, health, and skill acquisition. It leaves little time for fostering the community and creativity that humans crave.

And the injustice of capitalism is that it does so in an era of plenty. There are enough resources to ensure basic material satisfaction for all, but capital mandates that those resources do not benefit the great majority. Further, those same resources have been generated by the hard work of the population that is denied its benefits.

Marx demonstrated that there was no moral or practical justification for the concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny minority, and Piketty shows that is still the case. So when right-wing ideologues pronounce the need for “love and joy and friendship” or of “forms of solidarity that give meaning to life,” they don’t get that those are precisely the kind of social visions that will always be under threat within capitalism.