Form: Quote Commentary

https://www.amazon.com/Best-Karl-Marx/dp/1630691844/THE LAST BOOK ON MARX AND MARXISM

The end of The Second Generation of Abrahamic Big Lies.

The best of Karl Marx is a refutation of Marx.

The author’s Introduction summarizes the criticism that “without the labor theory of value there is no surplus value”.

I usually start any conversation this way: 1) is the value created by the risk and rational organization of production on speculation of returns or the riskless physical act of production for the certainty of pay? 2)if labor is due a portion of the profits are they not liable for a portion of the losses? 3) if the profits from production are marginal – meaning that there are none at all for two thirds of production, then increasingly more so until over production and decline in profits, does that mean that laborers should work for free until profits begin and keep working as profits decline?

Marx never finished because he read the Marginalists and knew he was refuted. Yet the big lie lives on.

Dunning Kruger in everything.

FROM THE AUTHOR – DON QUIXOTE’S WINDMILL

more “insoluble [challenge] for its successor, vulgar economy.”3 Marx’s unfinished manuscript along with a soon-to-be published third volume would deliver the necessary solution, or so Engels promised.

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.’

https://www.amazon.com/Best-Karl-Marx/dp/1630691844/

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https://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2019/10/the-best-of-karl-marx.htmlUpdated Jan 2, 2020, 4:56 PM