Suggested mental exercise for the reader: attempt to briefly illustrate how the socioeconomic views of Ayn Rand and G.K. Chesterton, respectively, could be considered as being relatively closer to, and farther from, the worldview of Karl Marx.

Never mind Marx, that's pretty obvious if you know anything about the non-straw version of Ayn Rand's ideas. For all that she liked to frame her arguments in individualist terms, Rand's deal was basically all about a conflict between creative and exploitative classes as mediated by social and technological changes; her idea of the creative class just included people like entrepreneurs and financiers (though it's worth noting that her heroes were usually artists or engineers), and didn't include most ordinary laborers. Once you pick this up, Atlas Shrugged basically -- and not without some irony -- becomes Class Warfare: The Novel.

She and Marx also had similar ideas about the role of religion in the public sphere, and both liked to express their ideas as deriving from a small set of abstract principles (though Marx's take on it is basically Hegelian, and Rand's got some kind of strange quasi-Aristotelian thing going on). I haven't read as much Chesterton, but from what I gather he's more of a status-quo paleocon, and of course became famously Catholic.