I teach a course called “Classical and Marxian Political Economy.” We’re currently reading Adam Smith, and I made a reference to a couple of ideas that would appear later in Marx. I said in class that Marx was clearly a genius, and in reading his work it is clear that you are dealing with an incredible mind that was spectacularly wrong about a great many things. A student asked if we should reserve the word “genius” for those who got things right. Generally, when I refer to a historical figure as a genius I am thinking purely in terms of ability. Marx, I think, is a clear example of genius steered profoundly and tragically wrong by an unflagging, intemperate anti-intellectualism and an unwillingness to do anything other than ladle contempt upon critics.
I generally defer to minds greater than mine for an assessment of Marx’s place in the history of economic thought. Deirdre McCloskey--who has described herself as an “Austrian economist in neoclassical drag”--has called him the greatest social scientist of the nineteenth century and has said that anyone who disagrees needs to read more Marx. Joseph Schumpeter obviously took Marx very seriously as an economist and social theorist. Michael Munger has called Marx the first public choice theorist. albeit perhaps not entirely seriously (indeed, there are elements of public choice reasoning in Adam Smith). Like many other scholars (McCloskey again, and Douglass North), Thomas Sowell rejected the Marxism of his youth but still took Marx seriously enough to write a book about it. And yet I am not convinced that Marx is relevant beyond his obvious importance as a figure in the history of economic thought. I have only been able to make it about halfway through volume I of Capital because (a) I know how this story ends and (b) even though it’s colorfully written Marx’s open and bare contempt for anyone other than himself, essentially, is laid bare on every single page.
Beyond the fact that Marx talked about interesting things, I don’t see why he’s treated with the veneration and respect he gets in departments outside of economics. So I’ll lay it out. I have never been satisfied with answers to my question: what in Marx doesn’t derive from his demonstrably false economics? He was a system-builder, to be sure, but once you dispense with his treatment of value it appears that the whole system collapses into a heap of irretrievable nonsense that is only memorable because it is colorfully written. I am wading through volume I of “Capital” and am planning to watch David Harvey’s online lectures, but Marx offers little to suggest that wading through page after page after page of bilious screed is a very good use of my time.
Marxism unmasked
Re-reading some of Marx’s 1844 manuscripts makes it pretty clear that a lot of Marxian scholarship is critical exegesis of holy writ. Marx leaves himself impervious to criticism by claiming that our ideas are mere ideology--the intellectual embodiment of our interests, whatever those are. I found the persistence and appeal of Marx’s criticisms of capitalism fairly inexplicable until I read this quote form Ernst Mandel’s introduction to Volume I of Capital:
An economic theory based upon the historical relativity of every economic system, its strict limitation in time, tactlessly reminds Messrs the capitalists, their hangers-on and their apologists that capitalism itself is a product of history. It will perish in due course as it once was born. A new social form of economic organization will then take the place of the capitalist one: it will function according to other laws than those which govern the capitalist economy.
To be blunt, that’s eschatology. It isn’t social science or history. As I read this passage, it looks like Marx and his followers felt no need to explain how socialism would work because there was apparently some future singularity beyond which the laws of economics would change so that socialism would work.
