Reddit mentions of Karl Marx and the Close of His System

You're downvoted because the labor theory of value was debunked over 100 years ago by Bohm-Bawerk.

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https://www.amazon.com/Karl-Marx-Close-His-System/dp/1466347686/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=bohm+bawerk&qid=1562712831&s=gateway&sr=8-1

>The labor theory of value (upon which the notion of 'surplus labor' is based) fails because it treats economic value as mind-independent.

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>But the fact is that a good only acquires economic value when people want that good. It has absolutely nothing to do with the amount of work that has to go into producing it - I could work really hard at coughing up a wad of phlegm.

Bad analogy and worse, you're intentionally associating a value and commodities with something bad with no intention of honest discourse.

Let's take a sword and use work and muscles to change raw iron into one. The work that goes into creating a cheaply made scimitar gives the iron a different value from one that gives us a stronger blade such as a Honzo. The way they are worked and created are also important to consider. What you're forgetting is that Marx was more interested in what happen during the work and how people were ripped off or exploited. You're more concerned about the end product and how it's shipped.

>The economic value of X is what you can get in exchange for X. And people will only give you something in exchange for your X if you can convince them that an X would be helpful in assisting them as a means to their ends.

Case in point. You focus more on the market after production has occurred and don't see what goes on in the enterprise. This hides you from the exploitation that Marx pointed out. If you don't see the exploitation and don't know it's occurring, how can you comment on it?

> "Marginal utilities" aren't some evil capitalist trick used to disguise exploitation, they're a fundamentally different way of looking at economics as a social science.

The person that rewrote and "disproved" the labor theory of value was

Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk

>Böhm-Bawerk was also one of the first economists to discuss Karl Marx’s views seriously. He argued that interest does not exist due to exploitation of workers. Workers would get the whole of what they helped produce only if production were instantaneous. But because production is roundabout, he wrote, some of the product that Marx attributed to workers must go to finance this roundaboutness, that is, must go to capital. Böhm-Bawerk noted that interest would have to be paid no matter who owned the capital. Mainstream economists still accept this argument.

He claims his theories close the book on Marxian economics

So what that allows everyone else to do is ignore any critical theories coming up against bourgeois economics and go in a different direction entirely. Eventually, that eliminates a generation of people from finding the very alternatives which Marx talked about.

So yes... The economics department has been hiding its criticisms for a while from looking to the alternative to capitalism.

Fun fact: Karl Marx's book, Capital, is shorter than the one he wrote about the Economic theory of Surplus Value where he wrote about each author that came before him.