Marx estava certo?

Marx was right, por Chris Dillow:

- Some work by Jeremy Greenwood vindicates Marx’s claim that “the mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life.”

- The labour theory of value, much maligned as it is, does a rather good job of explaining relative prices

- Daniel Kahneman’s work on cognitive biases can be read as corroboration of Marx’s theory that capitalism generates an ideology which prevents people seeing its injustices.

- A lot of work in public choice is quite consistent with the Marxian view that “the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”

Of course, Marx got some forecasts wrong*. Capitalism has not (yet!) collapsed - though it might yet - but in forecasting this he was largely elaborating upon the stationary state discussed by Smith and Ricardo.

But the fact is that, viewed from a narrowly empirical basis, Marxism scores rather well - and (arguably) quite possibly better than a lot of mainstream or neoliberal economics. Which raises the suspicion that the appeal of the latter over Marxism might rest on considerations other than empirical fact.

* We can leave central planning aside, as Marx probably wrote about as much on central planning as Adam Smith did on the invisible hand - which is to say, very little.