Regardless of what you think of Marx's economics (and it seems you haven't thought much about it, since modern Marxist economists have improved some of ideas and rejected others), it is totally incorrect to say he was economically illiterate. Marx had an encyclopedic knowledge of political economy, and all his predecessors, including Smith, Ricardo, Say, Bailey, J.S. Mill, etc. - that much is visible through his notes and published works.
>This was proven wrong in his own lifetime as factory worker wages rapidly grew in industrializing Britain.
Marx effectively writes about this in Capital.
e: as far as the increasing wages of english workers towards the end of the 19th century, you would have to look at engels' criticism of the bourgeois labour party (written to marx) and the continuation of that work by lenin (imperialism, etc). i don't think you actually care about any of this. the mere indication of a historical difficulty within the field of political economy is good enough for you to call marx an illiterate quack (not even the grimiest neoclassical economist would go this far). whatever helps you feel good about your brain i guess
>>the mere indication of a historical difficulty within the field of political economy is good enough for you to call marx an illiterate quack
Claiming automation would reduce wages is a basic fallacy that economic laymen believe in. No one with even a moderate grasp of economics would believe this. He was a quack.
>>whatever helps you feel good about your brain i guess
You are promoting a man who had an amateur understanding of economics, and whose doctrines wherever they came to be adopted led to tyrannies the likes of which the world had never seen before.
You do have to read about modern Marxist economic replies to objections over a century old. The likes of Guglielmo Carcheidi, Kliman and Freeman, and even non-Marxist economists sympathetic to Marx answer many of these problems.
>Claiming automation would reduce wages is a basic fallacy that economic laymen believe in.
This is not strictly the claim that Marx makes, and this claim you attribute to him only comes from a particular logical view of Marx rather than his own logic.
Huh? I quoted him asserting that mechanization would reduce wages.
Marx only identifies the introduction of machinery lowering the wage rate on the idea that with such machinery, workers are more substitutable - but as far as I know he did not account for the rising proportion of people taking up what he described as a "numerically unimportant class", "engineers, mechanics, joiners". In fact, this class of workers has not seen the same reduction or stagnation in the wage rate that Marx saw would happen with low skill workers.
"And precisely taking into account the forms of technical progress which Marx considered - that is the division of labour, capital saving, the mechanization of production and innovations - a fall in the maximum rate of profit can happen only in very particular cases, and no need arises to keep wages at a minimum in order to avoid a fall in the rate of profit."[0]
[0] https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/20976/1/MPRA_paper_20976.pdf
For Marx, the employer's profit was solely expropriated surplus value generated by workers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_value
>>Marx uses the term Mehrwert to describe the yield, profit or return on production capital invested, i.e. the amount of the increase in the value of capital. Hence, Marx's use of Mehrwert has always been translated as "surplus value", distinguishing it from "value-added". According to Marx's theory, surplus value is equal to the new value created by workers in excess of their own labor-cost, which is appropriated by the capitalist as profit when products are sold.
Read his own words:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour...
>>We have said: "Wages are not a share of the worker in the commodities produced by him. Wages are that part of already existing commodities with which the capitalist buys a certain amount of productive labor-power." But the capitalist must replace these wages out of the price for which he sells the product made by the worker; he must so replace it that, as a rule, there remains to him a surplus above the cost of production expended by him, that is, he must get a profit.
The man also believed that automation would reduce the demand for labor, and with it, wages:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour...
>>But even if we assume that all who are directly forced out of employment by machinery, as well as all of the rising generation who were waiting for a chance of employment in the same branch of industry, do actually find some new employment – are we to believe that this new employment will pay as high wages as did the one they have lost? If it did, it would be in contradiction to the laws of political economy. We have seen how modern industry always tends to the substitution of the simpler and more subordinate employments for the higher and more complex ones. How, then, could a mass of workers thrown out of one branch of industry by machinery find refuge in another branch, unless they were to be paid more poorly? and
>>To sum up: the more productive capital grows, the more it extends the division of labour and the application of machinery; the more the division of labour and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.
This was proven wrong in his own lifetime as factory worker wages rapidly grew in industrializing Britain.
He was an economically illiterate quack promoting basic fallacies like Ludditism that are popular with laymen.