Short Essay On Marxism

In the wake of communism’s collapse, traditional Marxism, which so many mainstream economists criticized relentlessly for decades, is now seriously questioned by a growing number of disillusioned radicals and former Marxists.

Today there is a vibrant post-Marxism, associated with the efforts of those active in the scholarly journal Rethinking Marxism, for instance. Pete Boettke and I were graduate students at George Mason University at the time, and once a month on Fridays we'd go shopping for u...

Rather than trying to solve esoteric puzzles about the labor theory of value or offering new theoretical models of a planned economy, many of today’s sharpest post-Marxists appreciate marginal analysis and the knowledge and incentive problems of collective action. His efforts in Capital are best understood in light of his 1844 Manuscripts." About twenty years ago I purchased my three volumes of the definitive Charles Kerr edition of Karl Marx's Capital from the Victor Kamkin bookstore in the Washington D.

In this new literature, "There are not two Smiths (the economist and the moral philosopher).

The labor theory of value is a major pillar of traditional Marxian economics, which is evident in Marx’s masterpiece, Capital (1867).

The theory’s basic claim is simple: the value of a commodity can be objectively measured by the average number of labor hours required to produce that commodity.

Karl Marx was one of the greatest revolutionaries of the nineteenth century.

He initiated the historical dimension to an understanding of society, culture and economics.

The entire capitalist system—with its private property, money, market exchange, profit-and-loss accounting, labor markets, and so on—must be abolished, thought Marx, and replaced with a fully planned, self-managed economic system that brings a complete and utter end to exploitation and alienation.

A socialist revolution, argued Marx, is inevitable.