I know why you get downvoted. People tend to forget, so, that Marx actually was a pretty good, and respected, economist. And when he came up with "Das Kapital" it was one way of interpreting the nascent, unlimited capitalism of the industrial revolution. It's a pitty he was co-opted by people like Lenin or Trotzky. Less for what these two were or did, but more for the fact that they led to unlimited communism and Stalinism. Because of that, Western society tends to discard Marx. Looking around, seeing VC capital burning start-ups unhinging industries through capital alone, seeing a raising gig industry, I think Marx is as relevant as he ever was.

oO, was I downvoted? At the moment it seems to be a plus.

But either way is fine, I am not self-censoring and don't really care for internet-points ^^

You're totally right, few people have read Marx but a lot of people have an opinion about him.

> People tend to forget, so, that Marx actually was a pretty good, and respected, economist.

He was working with flawed economic concepts, like the labor theory of value. He tried and failed to relate "value" derived from labor to actual market prices. (We now know that the problem he set up was even logically not solvable.) The "economics" you find in Das Kapital is essentially a zeroth-order approximation to what would be considered economic reasoning today, a bit like Aristotle's physics compared to Einstein's GR. It is of some very niche interest for things like input/output analysis, which is important to computable simulations of the economy. But for anything else, it's just not useful.

> He was working with flawed economic concepts.

That may well be true. But I'm not convinced that modern economists are doing any better. For example, consider how much economic work is still based on the utterly flawed concept that humans are rational in a classical sense.

> consider how much economic work is still based on the utterly flawed concept that humans are rational in a classical sense

It is not. In its descriptive mode, economics captures animal spirits well. In its prescriptive mode, yes, this is assumed. But rationality is a simplifying assumption, with work then done to explain why the reality observed in the descriptive mode diverges from the predicted behaviour of rational actors. Put another way, the rationality assumption is part spherical cow, part “what would we do were we rational?”

Rejecting modern economics for the rationality assumption is rejecting modern physics for its use of frictionless environments.

One thing about Marx is that he is as much history lesson as current economics lesson. Not that he, or other economists (the stuff from Mill I read is quite interesting, his "On Liberty" is great IMHO), are somehow fundamentally wrong today. They do have to be adapted for the last 100+ years so.

We failed so far to accurately link work and market prices, capitalism is enabling that portion and is skewing things up. Marx did ask the question so, something most other economists never did. He also took a look at the social consequences for the working people, again something that is hardly done even today.

If you ignore the social aspects of capitalism and economics completely, sure, Marx doesn't look like an Einstein. If you include those, that changes, doesn't it?

EDIT (a long one): Recently I read "Faster, Cheaper, Better - A history of Manufacturing (pretty sure that's the right title, it's in a shelf at home right now) about the history of manufacturing from the stone age to LEAN and beyond, written by a former Toyota LEAN guy and current Professor at Karlsruhe University. Great book, can only recommend it. It is showing well researched examples for each period, including my personal favorite the Venetian Arsenal. And I totally agree with the author that we, as man kind, came out better every time we improved manufacturing. In the long run, in the short run we paid incredible high prices in health, lives and social issues. These short term consequences are just glanced over in this book, hand waved like "yadayadayada, child labor and harsh working conditions bad,... things improved, society better now".

Marx lived during the industrial revolution, he saw those problems first hand. He saw that people with capital got rich, exploiting poor people and driving whole societies and professions into the ground. The Luddites are sold as backwards thinking folks today. Back then, when you just lost your own, small workshop that provided food for your family too a manufacture, when your own, and your kids prospects, changed from stable income to ruined health, 12 hour work days and being treated as cattle, they seem to be quite reasonable so.

That Marx was the only prominent (there were certainly more, Marx being the most famous) economist looking at those issues says more about economists and politicians of the day than it says about Marx.

That those social aspects of our technological improvements are glanced over also tells a lot about us. We are in the middle of a second industrial revolution, one that is aggravated by climate change. We will have a ton of those social issues down the road. And we are not thinking about those enough. That we basically have to fall back to Marx to get some potential answers speaks volumes about modern economics, social sciences and engineering.

Marx also saw the potential of sustained economic growth way before anyone else did. He thought that socialism itself would only start making sense and become actionable after capitalism had exhausted its own growth potential; this is what would have made socialist revolution a foregone conclusion, a necessity of history - and an intermediate step towards full post-scarcity, which is what he meant by 'communism'. If he deserves to be called an economist (and I believe he does!) it's for these things. Not really for anything he wrote in Das Kapital.

I think most socialist that read theory know this, that is why they say socialism is more the road from capitalism to the never reachable utopia called communism. At least that is how i have understand their explanation, das kapital is still on my reading list but it such a big book its kind of intimidating to start and given the limited amount of free time i have xD

> He tried and failed to relate "value" derived from labor to actual market prices. (We now know that the problem he set up was even logically not solvable.)

Could you expand on that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformation_problem has a general introduction to the issue.

Not to mention, Marx was fascinated with capitalism and credits much to capitalism. He was a student of Ricardo and Smith. He respected both men deeply. In fact, a lot of Marx's work is an extension of Smith's own ideas and the use of Smith's own language and phrases. It is just, Marx comes to a conclusion that Capitalism has it's limits as a liberating force and thus develops his own ideas of socialism to take the reigns from Capitalism and continue the march of progress. In the critiques Marx has of Capitalism, they are even shared with Smith or deeply influenced by Smith's own struggles with issues that can become present in Capitalism.

We see a lot of Marx's basic ideals parroted by people without people realizing it. My favorite is Tucker Carlson listeners who spit on Marx. The idea of an elite with money/resource control controlling politics is literally straight out of Marx's writings and is a talking point Tucker Carlson likes to use.

> In fact, a lot of Marx's work is an extension of Smith's own ideas and the use of Smith's own language and phrases.

Yes, Marx took the bad parts out of Smith and Ricardo and made a weird theory based on his reification of labor and value.

> We see a lot of Marx's basic ideals parroted by people without people realizing it. My favorite is Tucker Carlson listeners who spit on Marx. The idea of an elite with money/resource control controlling politics is literally straight out of Marx's writings and is a talking point Tucker Carlson likes to use.

Does Marx have a monopoly on this idea? It is a very trivial thing to believe, you don’t need Marx for that.

> that Marx actually was a pretty good, and respected, economist

He wasn’t.

> And when he came up with "Das Kapital" it was one way of interpreting the nascent, unlimited capitalism of the industrial revolution.

Das Kapital was just a bad book in terms of economic theory regardless of its anthropological value.

> Because of that, Western society tends to discard Marx.

Economists tended to discard Marx long before Lenin.

> I think Marx is as relevant as he ever was

Hm. I am not sure I understand the connection.

>He wasn’t.

He was.

>Das Kapital was just a bad book in terms of economic theory regardless of its anthropological value.

Das Kapital is a great book in both economic and anthropologic terms.

>Economists tended to discard Marx long before Lenin.

No they didn't.

>Hm. I am not sure I understand the connection.

You should try reading Das Kapital.

Well, if you want to know opinion of his contemporaries you should read what they have written. Also, the third volume has a preface by Engels that tries to deflect criticism of contemporary economists.

> You should try reading Das Kapital.

Well, maybe you should try re-reading it, because as far as I understand it, it doesn’t say anything close to that; though I am sure there is an interpretation that claims so as there are dozens of various contradictory Marx’s interpretations.

Get some self awareness man, I was pointing out how combative without substance your comment was.

"No, you're wrong. That's not how it was."

What is asserted without evidence can be discarded without evidence.

You are better off with anything Proudhon or Silvio Gesell wrote. The problem with Silvio Gesell is that some of the Marxist criticism only applies to the brain dead ideas and people forget that there are four volumes of Das Kapital which means some of it is actually not complete garbage. The problem is that nobody has time to read the books.

Ironically, the first volume is the most popular and yet the worst of them all.