PM is on target. Marxism does not build – it destroys.
Here is the link.
Here are some excerpts.
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Karl Marx’s influence among intellectual elites underwent a massive rebound in recent years. In 2018, mainstream publications including the New York Times, the Economist, and the Financial Times ran gushy homages to the communist philosopher to commemorate the bicentennial of his birth. Marx’s Communist Manifesto consistently ranks as the most frequently assigned book on university course syllabi, with the exception of a few widely used textbooks. Bibliometric evidence of Marx’s prevalence abounds in academic works, where he consistently ranks among the most frequently cited authors in human history. The academy erupted with yet another fanfare for Marx last month, when Princeton University Press released a new translation of his magnum opus, Das Kapital.
The high level of Marx veneration in modern academic life makes for a strange juxtaposition with the track record of Marx’s ideas. The last century’s experiments in Marxist governance left a trail of economic ruination, starvation, and mass murder. When evaluated on a strictly intellectual level, Marx’s theories have not fared much better than their Soviet, Chinese, Cambodian, Cuban, or Venezuelan implementations. Marx constructed his central economic system on the labour theory of value – an obsolete doctrine that was conclusively debunked by the “marginal revolution” in economics in the 1870s. Capital was also riddled with internal circularities throughout, including its inability to reconcile the pricing of labour as an input of production with labour as a priced value onto itself. By the turn of the 20th century, Marx’s predictive claims about the immiserating forces of capitalism were confronted with the tangible reality of growing and widening levels of prosperity.
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When mainstream economists first noticed Marx’s work in the years following his death, they made mincemeat of his doctrines over their aforementioned contradictions. Alfred Marshall, in his 1890 textbook, described Capital as an exercise in circular reasoning “shrouded in mysterious Hegelian phrases.” When John Maynard Keynes assessed Marx’s works in 1925, he dismissed Capital as “an obsolete economic textbook […] without interest or application for the modern world.”
The high level of Marx veneration in modern academic life makes for a strange juxtaposition with the track record of Marx’s ideas. The last century’s experiments in Marxist governance left a trail of economic ruination, starvation, and mass murder. When evaluated on a strictly intellectual level, Marx’s theories have not fared much better than their Soviet, Chinese, Cambodian, Cuban, or Venezuelan implementations. Marx constructed his central economic system on the labour theory of value – an obsolete doctrine that was conclusively debunked by the “marginal revolution” in economics in the 1870s. Capital was also riddled with internal circularities throughout, including its inability to reconcile the pricing of labour as an input of production with labour as a priced value onto itself. By the turn of the 20th century, Marx’s predictive claims about the immiserating forces of capitalism were confronted with the tangible reality of growing and widening levels of prosperity.
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When mainstream economists first noticed Marx’s work in the years following his death, they made mincemeat of his doctrines over their aforementioned contradictions. Alfred Marshall, in his 1890 textbook, described Capital as an exercise in circular reasoning “shrouded in mysterious Hegelian phrases.” When John Maynard Keynes assessed Marx’s works in 1925, he dismissed Capital as “an obsolete economic textbook […] without interest or application for the modern world.”
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