Marxistic - Criticisms

Criticisms

Criticisms of Marxism have come from various political ideologies. Democratic socialists and social democrats reject the idea that socialism can be accomplished only through class conflict and a proletarian revolution. Many anarchists reject the need for a transitory state phase. Other critiques come from an economic standpoint. Economists such as Friedrich Hayek have criticized Marxism for allocating resources inefficiently.

Some contemporary supporters of Marxism argue that many aspects of Marxist thought are viable, but that the corpus is incomplete or outdated in regards to certain aspects of economic, political or social theory. They may therefore combine some Marxist concepts with the ideas of other theorists such as Max Weber: the Frankfurt school is one example.

V. K. Dmitriev, writing in 1898, Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz, writing in 1906-07, and subsequent critics have alleged that Marx's value theory and law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall are internally inconsistent. In other words, the critics allege that Marx drew conclusions that actually do not follow from his theoretical premises. Once these alleged errors are corrected, his conclusion that aggregate price and profit are determined by, and equal to, aggregate value and surplus value no longer holds true. This result calls into question his theory that the exploitation of workers is the sole source of profit.

Both Marxism and socialism have received considerable critical analysis from multiple generations of Austrian economists in terms of scientific methodology, economic theory, and political implications. During the marginal revolution, subjective value theory was rediscovered by Carl Menger, a development which undermined the British cost theories of value fundamentally. The restoration of subjectivism and praxeological methodology previously employed by classical economic scientists including Richard Cantillon, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Jean-Baptiste Say, and Frédéric Bastiat led Menger to criticise historicist methodology in general. Second-generation Austrian economist Eugen Böhm von Bawerk employed praxeological and subjectivist methodology attacking the law of value fundamentally. Non-Marxist economists have regarded his criticism as definitive with Gottfried Haberler arguing that Böhm-Bawerk's critique of Marx's economics was so thorough and devastating that as of the 1960s no Marxian scholar had conclusively refuted it. Third-generation Austrian Ludwig Von Mises sparked the economic calculation debate by identifying that without price signals in capital goods all other aspects of the market economy are irrational. This led him to declare "...that rational economic activity is impossible in a socialist commonwealth." Mises then elaborated on every form of socialism more completely in his 1922 book Socialism, an Economic and Sociological Analysis. Contemporary Austrian critics include Murray Rothbard, David Gordon Yuri Maltsev, Gary North, and Joseph Salerno.