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    Introduction to The Best of Karl Marx

    Introduction to The Best of Karl Marx is Phillip W. Magness's introduction to his new book, The Best of Karl Marx. The best can be summarized as “Who should tilt at such a windmill?” It is a succinct summary of the flaws in his thinking for anyone with a modicum of economics background. I'll try to cut to the chase.

    ...Even at this early date however, Marx’s solution offered little more than a foray into economic obsolescence. The study of political economy had already advanced beyond the Labor Theory of Value on which Marx’s “surplus value” explication depended. The so-called Marginal Revolution had been triggered over a decade earlier by near-simultaneous refutations of the Labor Theory by Carl Menger, William Stanley Jevons, and Leon Walras, each contesting the underlying claim that the value of a good could be obtained by aggregating the steps of its production.

    If value arose from individual subjective assessments of a good’s utility, determined on the margin, or in situational reference to an additional unit, then the calculations that Marx offered were not only internally flummoxed but economically moot – a solution to a question that was no longer being asked and that the mainline of economic inquiry had rejected over a faulty premise.

    Without the Labor Theory of Value to undergird it, there is no “surplus value” to calculate. And without surplus value, Marxism loses its only mechanism with which to tangibly assert and measure its claim that class stratification under capitalist productive processes functioned to separate the laborer from the fruits of his labor. By the turn of the twentieth century Marx’s academic reputation – never strong to begin with, having emerged primarily as a political movement rooted in revolutionary labor activism – had been reduced to the intellectual equivalent of Don Quixote’s windmill...
    That's it, the flaw was adopting the labor theory of value. As Ludwig von Mises put it: "a garbled rehash of the theories of Adam Smith and, first of all, of Ricardo."

    More damning:

    Other subsequent developments in economic theory have further weakened auxiliary doctrines of the Marxist framework. For example, the notion that class identity functionally drives political (or really any other) type of collective action appears to be undermined by a pervasive free rider problem.[7] Similarly as regards distributional considerations, even if one were to assume the presence of an unjust initial or subsequent allocation of property, that allocation’s economic consequences are subordinate to the question of whether property rights exist in the first place.[8] Then there’s the practical matter of the Marxist political track record. After dozens of attempts to restructure societies around both revolutionary and nominally-democratic variants of Marxist doctrine, an unambiguous pattern of economic immiseration and mass political atrocities emerges.
    As to why Marxism persists:

    ...That [chasm that emerged between Marxist doctrine and the mainline of economic thinking over the last 150 years] also helps to explain the stumbling block that economic analysis often poses to other disciplines, and particularly the humanities. While economists make little use of Marx today beyond mapping his place in the history of economic thought, his continued influence outside of the profession reveals the existence of a sharp epistemic divide over theories of value and their derivative social implications. Much of that persistence appears to originate in ideological affinity for the prescriptive claims and promised outcomes of his theories, offered in detached abstraction that evades both the scrutinizing eye of subsequent advances in economic analysis and the harsh realities of the Marxist system’s attempted implementation over the last century....
    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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    If you prefer that in rap...

    Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler

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