Customer Reviews

Karl Marx and the Close of His System/Bohm-Bawerk's Criticism of Marx

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

To tell the truth, all I was able to read of this book is Bohm-Bawerk's Introduction, but that was enough. To get the jist of the Introduction, one must remember that Marx was setting up an Economic Model. Bohm-Bawerk rightly spotted an error in the Marx Model, the Production Function. The jist of his rebbutal is that just because something is produced is no reason that anyone wants it, case in point being a toothless comb for bald men. Bohm-Bawerk is really using Menger's Principles to underline Marx'es Mistake. The result was the evolution of this discussion into von Mises'es Socialist Calculation Debate.

To tell the truth, the rest of the book is an anticlimax, a lot of SEVERELY THEORETICAL stuff,which eventually boils down to a lot of Math and "backwards sixes". Karl Kautsky's rebuttal that Socialist Calculations so not have to follow Capitalistic (or for that matter, Rational) rules is self-serving. The Botkiewicz short-paper is ammusing in that it basically says "Here is a quickie Math equation that MIGHT WORK.", was not impressive.

The meat is in the Introduction. The rest is a hard read, and despite my degree in math, i did not think it worth the effort to continue. I still give it 5 stars because of the introduction, and the amusing futile rebuttal by Kautsky & Bortkiewicz.

This book is actually not by Von B?hm-Bawerk himself, as the Amazon list indicates, but a bundle of three translations from German to English by Paul Sweezy, a leading American Marxist scholar.

It starts with Von B?hm-Bawerk's "Zum Abschluss des Marxschen Systems" (a critique of Das Kapital based on the contradiction between Volume I and Volume III).
Subsequently we get "B?hm-Bawerks Marx-Kritik" by Rudolf Hilferding (NOT Kautsky, as the prior reviewer claims!), who gives a point-by-point rebuttal of the first article.
Then to close the work there's a statistical explanation of the transformation problem and Marx's solution to it by the now well-known Russian-Polish German statistician Ladislaus Bortkiewicz. This work is very mathematical and requires a reasonable knowledge of economic mathematics to understand.

All in all Sweezy has done good work to make these texts public for the first time in English, back in the day (1949). These texts, as well as others about the same subject translated for the first time in the English language, led to a revival of interest for the transformation problem and others in Marxist economics.