Skip to main content

Start From Zero? Or From One?


March Against Marx - Part 2

I have no intention of committing silly straw man attacks when I dispute the claims of the Big Man, so I'm going to link to eight important Marxist sources that will inform my understanding of Marxian economics. The ninth and tenth sources are where I'll be getting several of my criticisms from.

Karl Marx was better read as a teenager than I am now, and by the time he'd finished Capital Volume III was an intellectual force of nature. This means my critique must build on the work of economists past and present to have any hope of making a persuasive case.

Also, one vital point. I am not going to debunk Karl Marx's economics. To truly debunk it I would have to demonstrate its total wrongness or non-even-wrongness and either of those ends is beyond my abilities, and probably anybody's. Rather my contention will be that Marxian economics is less good as a way to analyse consumption, distribution and production than Austrian, New Classical & New Institutional economics.

~~~ ~~~ ~~~

Of course we have to have the four main econ volumes from the Big Man himself, Capital Vols I-III and The Value Form, because we need to see Marx's calculations at source to critique them fairly. [1][2][3][4]

~~~ ~~~ ~~~

[5]

~~~ ~~~ ~~~

[6]

~~~ ~~~ ~~~

[7]

~~~ ~~~ ~~~

Two blogs are going to be very important, Kapitalism 101 in favour of Marxian econ and Social Democracy in the 21st Century against. [8][9]

Finally, one big source is that doorstop of a macroeconomics text by Daron Acemoglu called Introduction to Modern Economic Growth. [10]

~~~ ~~~ ~~~


[1] Capital Volume I by Karl Marx from Marxists.org
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/

[2] Capital Volume II " "
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/index.htm

[3] Capital Volume III " "
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/

[4] The Value Form by Karl Marx from Marxists.org
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/appendix.htm

[5] The Marxist Theory of Value by TheFinnishBolshevik on Youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icavzxllFhA

[6] The Labour Theory of Value by drgerke on Youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_y8Z3JZuItw

[7] Econ 305 Marxian Economics Lectures on Youtube
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8B2364D7C0D31D63

[8] Kapitalism 101 blog maintained by Brendon M Cooney
https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/

[9] Social Democracy in the 21st Century blog maintained by LK
http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.co.uk/

[10] Introduction to modern Economic Growth by Daron Acemoglu
http://ppge.ufrgs.br/giacomo/arquivos/eco02237/acemoglu-2007.pdf

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

World Hunger - Getting Better or Worse?

Thinking about how rates of hunger have shifted over the last 25 years led me to the Global Hunger Index , which covers - wait for it - the last 25 years. What do we see by looking at their figures for hunger in different countries in the years for which data are available? The Global Hunger Index uses aggregated statistics to arrive at a 'score' for every country studied in a given year with 0 the ideal and 50+ an absolute nightmare of near famine-level proportions. If you were switched-on enough to follow the link above you probably noticed it includes an interactive world map showing the change in rates of hunger for folks in many countries that might best be described as low-income or middle-income. An illustration of the score system is just below. And just in case it wasn't already obvious that everything is getting better, here is the data for all of the individual countries measured on a scatter plot in terms of their reduction in GHI score from 2000

Iain McKay, Bryan Caplan & the Case of the "Anarchist" Anarchist

In the past I have written blog posts disputing claims contained in the online document called An Anarchist FAQ principally written by Iain McKay. I spent those posts trying to contend with Iain's claims re  the ancap question  and  the mode of production called capitalism . McKay has a bee in his bonnet re anarcho-capitalists' insistence on referring to themselves as anarchists, that much is obvious. Every reference to ancapism runs something along the lines of "an"cap or "anarcho"-capitalism. I find this very amusing because 'anarchist' or 'anarchism' are words (articulate mouth-sounds) first and specific concepts second.  Ditto 'socialist' and 'socialism' friends. Speaking of socialism... In  the comment section of one of his videos  the Youtuber called StatelessLiberty responded to a criticism by linking to Caplan's work  on the Anarchist adventure in Spain in the 1930's . The critic shot back with a  critic

Commentaryism - The Death Toll of Capitalism

How many people have died because capitalism exists? How many would still be alive if it had never existed? Let's dig in! We will take two approaches over the course of this blog post by looking at the the death tolls attributed to the word in its broad popular definition - everything socialists don't like - versus the toll that fits the definition offered previously on this blog. By the same token I will not lay any outsized figures at any other mode of production's door except where that mode of production demonstrably caused the problem that killed people. It's political ideologies that really matter here, and this is where the first big problem with even trying to lay a specific body count before capitalism runs into problems - there is no political ideology called capitalism. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Now then, Alfonso Gutierrez says  in a comment thread that "capitalism and free-markets have murdered billions of people" which is a risky cla