Rather, I’d say he’s the person who’s most often associated with the “great forces” view of history: there had previous attempts to look at it scientifically (with research, documents, archeological studies, rather than just a gloss of how good and great King Whatever had been), but always from an “individuals doing stuff” point of view. He looked at it in terms of whole-forests rather than trying to follow specific trees. The problem with this kind of analysis comes when people forget that “the market” is still formed of individuals, same as “the company” or “the government”.
The difference is that Marxism produces horrible catastrophes whenever it is tried regardless of how tyrannical the government is. Communists use tyranny to impose marxist economics on countries and then the economy is destroyed. Julius Nyere was not a monster like most communist leaders were but his policies left Tanzania unable to feed itself. That is a recurring theme in Marxist economies, the Ukraine, China, Ethiopia, and North Korea have all had huge famines that killed millions of people and they were all using marxist economics. If the marxists ever took over Saudi Arabia, they would have shortages of sand.
There is a reason marxism attracts monsters such as, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao, Kim, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Castro, Guevera, and Mengistu. The reason is that marxism is monstrous.
Bless your heart, but maybe you should look into Kapital one of these days, and discover how the labor theory of value works–or, perhaps, give it some quick thought yourself. Does Marx say value comes from putting labor into things? As you point out, that would be the height of foolishness. Marx is fully aware that for the kind of value he is talking about here (exchange, as opposed to use value) happens only when someone wants what you have (and then, by the way, even your mud-pie has value; that’s something even Adam Smith would have agreed with).
Marx’s question was, instead: if you are given a piece of cotton and some thread, and make a sheet out of it, adding, in the process, to the sale-value of the piece, where does the additional value come from? Marx’s answer is socially necessary labor time: which makes a good deal of sense, since that is all that is “expended,” as it were.
Much develops from there, which you may find in the often surprisingly entertaining Kapital.
I don’t think anyone is saying that Marx killed people. The worst thing he personally did was mooch off Engels (actually, the worst thing he did was write that jerky note when Engel’s mistress died, but. . .).
But the question isn’t what Marx did or didn’t do. The question is what his legacy was, and part of his legacy is what his followers did with his teachings, just like part of Jesus’s legacy is the crusades and the religious wars and the other stuff his followers did with his teachings.
As an economic historian, Marx had many good insights. However, his predictions about the evolution of economies failed. His "value theory"has been discredited, and he ignored the role of markets.
So, he is another 19th century philosopher whose work is of mainly academic interest, today.
But that fact spells death for historicism, for any attempt to form a deterministic general predictive theory of human history, Marx’ or anyone else’s. Because one of the principal drivers, probably the principal driver, of economic change is technological change – and technological change is inherently unpredictable. We can predict technological progress will continue to happen so long as the incentives, resources and funding for R&D are there, but we cannot predict its directions. Marx might have imagined such things as telephones and automobiles and airplanes, but he had no real way of knowing whether they could actually be made to work or not, let alone their full economic and social effects. Old issues of Popular Mechanics – written mostly by techies, who at least have a grip on reality in this area – are full of conceived inventions that might have changed the world, only for one reason or another they proved impractical. Controlled fusion and strong AI and genetic engineering and nanotech and neural-electronic interfaces might change the world – or they might all prove to be dead ends, impossible to make any practical use of.
And modern psychology is heavily indebted to Freud. Even though, today, most psychologists seem to agree that he was either wrong or unoriginal about nearly everything that made his reputation.
And yet Randians persist in denying that there is such thing as a “collective brain.” Of course there is. A civilization is a collective brain. A society is a collective brain. A legislature is a collective brain. A committee is a collective brain. An organization is a collective brain. A good marriage is a collective brain.
N.B.: The IQ of a collective brain is neither the sum nor the average of its member-neurons’ IQ points. (There would have to be some more complex formula.)
I recall that old-crank-lady at a Town Hall on the ACA, asking Barney Frank how he could support such a “Nazi policy.” He responded by comparing her to a table, to be ignored, which was fair. But he might better have pointed out that while Germany had UHC under the Nazis, it also had it before the Nazis. It was introduced by Bismarck. And he was no socialist. He introduced UHC, and universal-old-age pensions, to prevent socialism in Germany, to take some of the momentum out of the socialist movement there by pre-empting a couple of its least-radical demands. In the same way, FDR’s New Deal, intentionally or unintentionally, did take some wind out of the sails of the American Socialist Party and the Communist Party USA (both much bigger deals, then, than most now remember).
No,its about the "means of production"and the "value of labor"and surplus value.’
Marx ignored the real function of markets-that of transmitting information between buyer and seller.
BTW, the labor theory of value, right or wrong, goes back at least to John Locke and arguably to Aquinas. Smith embraced it, and Marx made no innovations there AFAIK.
The subjective theory of value, now more widely accepted, likewise goes back in some form to the Middle Ages – but, among economists, only to the late 19th Century.
“It’s worth what was put into it!”
“It’s worth what you can find somebody to pay for it!”
They both sound like very common-sense evaluations, don’t they? But from subtly different angles.
