He really was not. He was great at politics. He was great at taping into things that workers cared about.
But his actual economics that he laid out, in Das Kapital? The actual mathmatical equations in it, and falsifiable predictions in that book? The labor theory of value?
All pretty worthless. Basically no serious academic takes the labor theory of value seriously. It is non-sense.
Heterodox economic theories are heterodox for a reason. That reason being that they are not reflective of reality.
Not in the governance sense (he wasn't a statesmen), so you must mean in the other sense ("activities within an organization that are aimed at improving someone's status or position").
But this is sort of a difference without a difference, right? For most of human history, people who were "great at X" were in truth at least as good at politics as the thing they're actually known for.
Even e.g. Euclid was arguably a great geometer but an even greater politician.
Hell, Pythagoras was literally a cult leader.
With rare exceptions, your name isn't remembered by history unless you're good at politics.
> Basically no serious academic takes the labor theory of value seriously.
The labor theory of value is much older than Marx, and components of it are certainly taken seriously in management schools when talking about pricing services for example. Similarly, economists use components of other theories of value where it makes sense. I think it's more accurate to say that economics as a profession has moved on from these sorts of "generalizable theories of value" to give more nuanced analyses, which is quite different from saying that those theories proposed historically by Marx or Frisch or whoever have no influence.
Anyways, can you define "serious academic" in a way that doesn't make this sentence tautological? There's no one who claims Das Kapital is the Bible of Economics, but the same is true for Wealth of Nations and basically any other historical text. That doesn't mean that Smith and Marx are irrelevant, though.
> Anyways, can you define "serious academic" in a way that doesn't make this sentence tautological?
Sure. Basically the entire field of modern day economics does not take the labor theory of value, in the way that Marx means it.
In terms of an actual description of how economies work, almost all real life, professional, economists do not take Marxian "economics" seriously.
> to give more nuanced analyses
It is not a matter of something being "nuanced" or not. It is instead that the vast majority of modern day economists do not take Marxian economics seriously at all.
> Basically the entire field of modern day economics does not take the labor theory of value, in the way that Marx means it.
Yeah but that's true for EVERY theory of value contemporaneous to Marx.
Saying "economics reject the LTV" is in my mind a bit like saying that physicists reject Newtonian mechanics. It's both true but also severely under-estimates the significant influence of Newton on modern physics.
>> to give more nuanced analyses
> It is not a matter of something being "nuanced" or not. It is instead that the vast majority of modern day economists do not take Marxian economics seriously at all.
I gave one specific example: management schools still draw from labor theories of value to explain competitive pressure and price discovery in the service sector. There are hundreds of other examples like this.
"Few economists doubt that Marx flunked economics"
"Economists, looking back, have not found much to admire in Karl Marx"
That is what I mean. Economists just don't take seriously much of anything that Marx has to say on the actual field of economics, on the same level as that of flat earthers.
His only insights are maybe into politics. But not the actual field of economics.
When economists are saying that he "flunked" economists, as quoted from the article, it is intended to imply that basically nothing that Marx had to say, on actual economics matters at all, and is so ridiculous that we should compare it to conspiracy theories, or flat earthers, or something else that is equally nonsensical.
I'm not quite sure how to say this in a non-confrontational way, but...
the thesis of the article you quote is literally identical to the thesis of my posts -- that Marx is in fact influential on modern economics. Again, I don't want to be confrontational, but... did you read the article you're quoting? The thesis is literally the opposite of what you claim it is.
> "Few economists doubt that Marx flunked economics"
The rest of that paragraph reads as follows:
But this column argues that Marx’s representation of the power relationship between capital and labour in the firm is an essential insight for understanding and improving modern capitalism. Indeed, this insight is incorporated into standard principal–agent models of labour and credit markets.
So the article you are quoting for support states that Marxist ideas are incorporated into standard models. Not directly, of course, but there. Kinda like how Newtonian ideas are in some sense incorporated into standard model...
Let's continue.
> "Economists, looking back, have not found much to admire in Karl Marx"
And then the entire next paragraph makes literally exactly the same argument I'm making here -- that Marx is obsolete and even what he was trying to do in terms of "generalized models" is obsolete -- but that he none-the-less does effect modern economics:
These assessments are based largely on our current – and correct in my view – understanding of Marx’s labour theory of value as a pioneering, but inconsistent and outdated, attempt at a general equilibrium model of pricing and distribution. But there is another aspect of his work that has been strongly vindicated by theoretical advances in recent decades: the idea that the exercise of power is an essential aspect of the working of the capitalist economy, even in its idealised, perfectly competitive, state.
TBH, it looks like the best source you can muster for your claims is making substantively exactly the same argument I'm making.... Marx's theories are flawed but clearly continue to effect work-a-day economics to this day.
Worthless or a stepping stone? The Platonic conception of knowledge is obvious nonsense today. I am, in my epistemology, superior to Plato. But it is named Platonic though I achieved the understanding of its flaws as a teenager. And even just for the conception of this epistemology, Plato is remembered. It is not known as Wiltordian epistemology after my teenage revelations.
That's because in many things in science and knowledge, being among the first to predict things wrong in an interesting manner is valuable.
He really was not. He was great at politics. He was great at taping into things that workers cared about.
But his actual economics that he laid out, in Das Kapital? The actual mathmatical equations in it, and falsifiable predictions in that book? The labor theory of value?
All pretty worthless. Basically no serious academic takes the labor theory of value seriously. It is non-sense.
Heterodox economic theories are heterodox for a reason. That reason being that they are not reflective of reality.