We've got the Austrian family tree up there, and the founder of Austrian economics is Carl Menger, 1840 to 1921.
The generally accepted position on the Austrian school was that, of course, Menger was the founder, Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk was his most important student,
The explosion of Menger's study, which is all of the good, great stuff.
For one thing, Menger didn't write very much.
He wrote his great Principles of Economics in 1871.
It was supposed to be volume one of a mighty treatise,
which the rest of it never got published.
This, by the way, just as an aside, as scholars have said,
don't write books entitled part one or volume one,
because often the other parts never get written.
This is what happened to Menger. He never completed this.
It was supposed to be an introductory volume.
Then he got off on methodology, his famous methodological struggle with Schmuller, and his famous argument on the origin of money, and that's just about it.
There were a couple of other things, but basically he didn't write too much more than that.
With the exposure of Menger's studies, the whole series of essays on Menger, and there will be more of that coming up, fortunately, because what happened was all of his papers were for lectures and papers and all that.
Founded in the custody of Sun Carl Menger Jr., a distinguished mathematician at the University of Chicago, who refused to allow anybody to see them.
This is of course a mystery in itself. Why did he refuse to do this?
Tied up, by the way, with the mystery of why Menger retired early in 1903 from his chair, and didn't do anything after that.
Sort of retired and had his famous library, and that's about it.
Anyway, the story is, I'm not sure if this might be apocryphal, and I realize this is a reporting rumor here, but it's interesting anyway.
The story is that Carl Menger Jr. was haunted for all of his life by the fact that he was apparently an illegitimate son of the Carl Menger, Carl Menger Sr., by a housekeeper.
And in those days, of course, in Victorian Vienna, if I use that statement, this was a real shock and whatever, swept under the rug.
And apparently one of the reasons why, perhaps, why Menger retired from his chair early in his life, or earlier than he had to, was sort of this potential disgrace.
So anyway, Carl Menger Jr. refused to allow the papers, he's still at the age of 90 whenever he died,
he still felt this terrible stain, a little eugeniccy.
Apparently it was impossible to tell him that these days things are different.
So he died a couple of years ago and now the papers are at Duke University
and that's the whole process of being catalogued and open to scholars.
So we'll know more about Menger's ideas and where he stood on various things as time goes on.
One of the problems with the exposure of interest in Menger is that there is also an ideological grift connected with this hidden agenda in the accolades given to Menger, namely the depreciation and deprecation of von Boehm-Bawerk.
So as Menger has been lauded as the great founder of the Austrian School, which he was indeed,
the achievements of von Boehm-Bawerk have even been denigrated or forgotten and sort of stuffed away.
And this is part of what I call a nihilist trend in the modern Austrian movement.
There's also a sort of an attempt to claim that Menger and von Boehm-Bawerk were totally different,
disagreed on almost everything and so forth and so on. I don't think that's true. I'm not prepared to state one way or the other of this,
In 1871, Menger published his work in 1871 as a dramatic revolutionary trend in the German-speaking scene in general, and two young economists in their 20s, Wieser and Boehm-Bawerk, who were brothers-in-law
and others and fairly early in the game, became Menger's great disciples and eventually, both eventually taught at the University of Vienna after many years of teaching in other places.
And they came to disagree fairly sharply. I think it's, Wieser was certainly a praxeologist. He wrote on methodology in a sense, I think more than Boehm-Bawerk did.
But his basic view, and he also contributed to marginal utility theory and certainly opportunity course theory, but basically the whole rest of his approach I think was much more sort of pre-neoclassical or pre-Keynesian.
He did not believe, for example, in time structure capital, as von Boehm-Bawerk and Menger did.
At any rate, the two of them, and this is Mises told me one time in the seminar, the two of them were brothers-in-law, very close friends, and they never discussed economics, unless they got to the point where they disagreed on stuff.
Rudolf, the successor of the Austro-Hungarian throne, and sort of did with him apparently
what he did with Archbishop Fenningel and the Duke of Burgundy back in the early 18th
century France, late 17th century, early 18th century France.
Now one of the problems here, I'm not sure what Menger's political economic views were,
to me it's unclear. According to the Barry Smith book, there's an article on Menger's
and Political Economy, and Barry Smith, excellent compendium, called Austrian Economics, a series of essays really on Austrian philosophy, underlying Austrian economics.
Anyway, there's an essay there on Menger's political philosophy, which sounds pretty grim. It's sort of very conservative, semi-statist, Austrian, whatever.
According to Erich Streisler on the other hand, I met with him a couple of weeks ago in Austria, he claims that Menger's lectures, it's clear Menger's lectures are unpublished,
Manger tutored Crown Prince Rudolf in laissez-faire doctrine, since he was the successor of the Austrian throne, the idea that he would then take over and oppose classical liberalism and laissez-faire from above, so to speak.
I mentioned Archbishop Fennellon because that was his plan of how to bring laissez-faire, economics and politics to France.
Here they were living in the absolutism of Louis XIV.
It was sort of the epitome and apogee of absolutism and mercantilism, all the rest of it.
Here's Archbishop Fennellon with laissez-faire, anti-war, anti-militarism, everything, all the rest of it.
And what do you do about it? How do you convert the king?
The idea of building a mass movement was considered kind of bizarre.
bazaar. I don't think it was considered thinkable in late 17th century France. Previous mass
movements have been wiped out by the French monarchy. When Archbishop Fenwell decided
to do his converts, get a hold of the Crown Prince, the Grand Adolphe, who was going to
be the Grand Adolphe, was the grandson of Louis XIV, was supposed to take over the throne
of France and convert him. He was the Duke of Burgundy. And Archbishop Fenwell got up
and became the confessor and then the tutor of the Duke of Burgundy and he formed what
The Burgundy Circle, a group of people at the court, were the top laissez-faire scholars, historians, political philosophers and economists in France, and worked on the Duke and converted him, so by the time he grew up, he was totally dedicated to laissez-faire, eliminating all the statism, eliminating the taxes, the controls, and the rest of the whole structure of quasi-totalitarian statism that Louis XIV had imposed. Well, unfortunately what happened was, about a year before he would have taken over the throne, he and his entire family were wiped out in the measles epidemic.
The whole plan, a 25-year plan of converting the French monarchy without any dust.
Poor Feynman was, of course, in despair at this. I don't blame him.
Well, that's one of the problems with this kind of strategy here. Why am I converting one prince or something? What do you do if the prince corks off?
So essentially the same thing happened, apparently, with Menger and Prince Rudolf.
There's all sorts of Meyerling revisionism. Those of you who are interested in historical revisionism, there's a whole area.
The other one, much more interesting one, which Lee Langeger, by the way, is convinced of, is that he was murdered by the statists in the Austrian court who didn't want him to take over.
I'll leave that with you for further research that you're interested in pursuing myelin revisionism.
So, and apparently one of the reasons why Menger lost interest in scholarship and didn't do much since later in the last 20, 30 years of his life is because of the death of Crown Prince Rudolf, the end of the Rudolf experiment, so to speak.
To set the stage of the revolution that Menger effected, indeed, Menger and Boehm-Bawerk, the Austrian Revolution,
is that he was reacting against, of course, the historical school, which was dominant in German-speaking countries,
headed by Gustav Schmöller, who believed there were no economic laws, partly because he was interested in building up the state,
state power in Prussia and the rest of Germany, and it was inconvenient to have any economic laws out there which might contradict or confound government decrees and actions.
As a matter of fact, the famous phrase of Schmoller, which Mises likes to mention from time to time, is that the function of the University of Berlin, which is, of course, the creation of the Prussian state, the function of the professors of the University of Berlin is to form the intellectual bodyguard of the House of Hohenzollern, the dinastic Prussian monarchy.
And when Menger's Principle of Economics was published, it was greeted with hatred and, of course, some bitter derision of hatred by the Schmoller Right, so they began to organize a cadre campaign against it.
And then Menger got caught up in this same methodological conflict, explaining why there is such a thing as economic law and why it's not just historical bound and all the rest of it.
What Menger did in this principle was to really revive the continental tradition, the scholastic economic tradition, the tradition of Catalan and Turgao in 18th century France,
the tradition of subjective value theory, of individual action, that's really a force of praxeological work,
the focus on individual action and individual expectations and acting through time,
And in fact, of course, the consumers valuing the good determine the price of the good and also determine the value of the factors of production.
So the whole Austrian, the whole basic outlines of Austrian doctrine were in Menger's principles.
They weren't fully worked out, but they were sort of in there.
And they were essentially a revival in the development of the scholastic medieval and late Spanish scholastic and 18th century French tradition.
Well, there was, I'd say, there was a fight in Germany, a German-speaking country, there was a fight with the Schmullerites.
In England, of course, there was classical economics, classical economics, which
the Austrians never really grappled with too much, because they were much more concerned with grappling with Schmuller.
It's kind of a sweet thing that happened to me in the seminar, me in the seminar.
The one time we really had an argument, it was a very friendly argument, argued by my deviation, one of my
major deviations from Mises, which was on monopoly theory,
and I was claiming there was no such thing as monopoly on the free market.
Anyway, the discussion ended when he accused me of being a schmalerite.
The interesting thing is
that nobody else in the room, I think, understood what he was talking about and understood that this was the ultimate insult
at an Austrian level
and a critic.
So the Austrians never really came to grapple with the English classical tradition and understood
where they stood in relation to it. After all, England was far away. They were fighting with the German
German situation.
The English Classical School, and my vision, as Shrimp had recalled, my vision of the history of economic thought is that the English Classical School was the great detour, the great diversion from the mainline scholastic French tradition, the scholastic French tradition was a classic Daesh French tradition, continental tradition was a subject of value theory, it was basically what I call pre-Austrian. I realize it's anachronistic to say it, that's really what it was. With Adam Smith and with Smith and McCarter, the middle themes
The Theory of Money and Credit
and filial pietism, paying his great debt to his father, and by sheer intellectual bravura
and the fact that he had tremendous stature in England at that time, won the day and restored
the cardinalism to its unfortunate place in the history of thought.
So when Menger created, in front of the Austrian theory, standard, well, the standard discussion
since that of marginalism until very recently, of course, the standard discussion of history
The History of Thought books was, well, marginalism popped up in three, independent in three countries.
Menger in Austria, Jevons in England, and Valois in Switzerland.
And they were all basically the same. So the basic view of the History of Thought,
as I said until very recently, was, well, they're all about the same.
Menger, Jevons, and Valois, except that Menger didn't know math.
Menger was inferior because he didn't understand mathematics.
Therefore he should concentrate on Jevons and Valois.
and, of course, Balra has really taken over modern microeconomics.
If you read, for example, one of the most repellent and odious works written on von Bawerk by Stiegler,
George Stiegler, his Ph.D. dissertation called Productivity, Production and Distribution Theories,
where he has a chapter on Menger, a chapter on von Bawerk.
He really didn't like Menger, but he hated von Bawerk. All bad people hate von Bawerk.
What he said about von Bawerk, wow, he said he didn't understand mathematics.
That's it. Unfortunately, these guys did understand both Menger and von Boehm-Bawerk were trained in mathematics. They understood it all too well, which is why they rejected it.
This, of course, the idea of knowing mathematics and rejecting its application in economics does not even occur to mathematical economists. It's just outside their kin, an unthinkable thought.
Well, then what happens? Well, Austrian economics, even though this was the official view, so to speak, Austrian economics was extremely influential in the United States.
with Federer, Federer was a very important Austrian, Davenport, Green, these were important Austrians who ignored the British classical tradition or attacked it.
Unfortunately what happened in the United States was in World War I something snapped in American academic economics and theory drops out, the institutionalists take over.
Except for a few people here and there, Fisher and Knight who were unfortunate sort of premodularist types, pre-Chicago-like, Federer lost interest in economic theory more or less and got hung up on monopolies.
... hung up a monopoly, basing point monopoly, which he spent the rest of his life on.
So, unfortunately, this left a vacuum and institutionalism poured in.
So the American, a dumb-dumb variant of the Schmuller Historical School.
It means this is historical school people with no knowledge of history or social science or anything.
So these are the guys who sort of took over economic economics and left a theoretical vacuum in economic, in American economics.
Well, this meant that in England, which of course was sort of the rear home of economics, supposedly,
What happened in England was that the Austrian contribution was very cleverly and cunningly trivialized by Alfred Marshall, his mighty work, the principle of economics, and disposed of it that way by trivializing it.
And from then on, Austrian school was not considered, not even mentioned and thought of by English economists, by Cambridge economists or by anybody else in the English tradition.
And I grew up, I cut my ITs on Marshall. We had a very interesting college seminar, senior seminar, I spent the entire year on Marshall, coming through every chapter.
And it was very interesting, so I recommended it, especially if you had nothing else to read. Certainly better than Keynes.
But it was very interesting because that was considered economics. And what he did with Marshall utility theory, he trivialized it.
He said, well, it's interesting, it fills a gap in the Ricardian program, because Ricard really didn't consider consumers,
Douglas Goldstein, CFPÆ, is the director of the Profile Investment Services and the
And the real important thing about cost of course is labor pain or a back to Ricardo and Marx and all the rest of it.
It was a very clever device that he used. You can't say he ignored marginal utility. He just trivialized it.
He encapsulated it in a couple of appendices or whatever and that was it.
I remember when I was taking a history of thought at Columbia.
In those days the Columbia Graduate School was the top department, a question about it.
It had not fallen to its present sorry state, ranked among the top three graduate schools.
And my professor was J.M. Clark, a weird figure. I asked him, I said, well, well, I didn't know anything about Austria, and I asked him about Jevons, because I knew Jevons was so important, and I don't have to read Jevons, he said, it's all incorporated into Marshall.
I'm sure if I had known about Austria, he would have said the same thing about that. So that takes, it sort of shoves everything aside, Marshall then takes care of everything else.
And this was before the Keynesian takeover, this was the, this was the Marshallian takeover, of course the Keynesian takeover is really part of that, in a larger sense, as Keynes was a Marshall student.
So, to sum up Menger very quickly, what did he contribute? Again, he essentially brought back or developed a scholastic tradition, the praxeological method, the focus on individual action, entrepreneurship, all this comes in, of course, time, the time structure of production, the focus on individual, the fact that individual values of our consumers determine the, our expected values of consumers determine the value of the factors of production entrepreneurs are willing to invest in. The whole Austrian framework, if you read Menger, you know you're reading
Austrian books read differently, Austrian books read differently, look differently, smell differently than classical books.
One thing is no math in them, very little.
They're clear, they're logical, they proceed step by step.
There's no sort of sudden flights of abstract fancy, not grounded in actual individual action.
What about von Boehm-Bawerk?
What von Boehm-Bawerk did was he developed this outline, which Menger contributed,
in particular developed the value theory, developed the value and price theory, very important, this famous marginal pairs,
and of course the horses, you know about the horses, the first horse and the second horse and all that.
I developed the world diminishing marginal utility brilliantly and of course developed the entire capital interest theory.
He was the one who rescued capital interest theory from neglect.
And as I said, always consider that von Boehm-Bawerk was the main line from Hungary.
And it's only the last ten years or so when von Boehm-Bawerk has been deprecated by Lachmanians and other people.
They Establish Much
He said various things that he didn't like from Bawerk's Capital Theory.
Terrible mistake.
Okay.
Terrible mistake.
So what does that mean?
The Streisler view is that, he's written several articles on this, is that, well, he said
that it means that he didn't believe there was such a thing as a, he believed in time
preference.
We know that.
We know Menger said that time preference was important.
But somehow he didn't believe that time preference was reflected in the rate of interest.
There was no rate of interest.
There's too much of an equilibrating, equilibrating thing.
only 2,000 rates of interest around, there's no one rate of interest, there's no tendency toward it.
Well, that's possible, I don't believe it. As a matter of fact, I don't believe it. I don't think Menger rejected equilibration.
Kirzner, in a very interesting article in the Atlantic Economic Journal about 8 years ago,
so he's the head of a whole issue on Menger, a very subtle article, a typical Kirznerian article, very subtle.
He's one of the most understated economists I've ever read. You have to read him a great care, and it's pretty obvious
And obviously, he's refuting this idea that there's a big split between Menger and Boehm-Bawerk
and that they're really fairly similar.
If you look at Boehm-Bawerk himself, what does he say about Menger?
He doesn't say that Menger doesn't believe in a rate of interest.
He says that Menger believes in a rate of interest, but it's incorrect.
By the way, I recommend Boehm-Bawerk highly.
I love reading Boehm-Bawerk.
He's probably one of the great polemicists in the history of economic thought.
Menger is very respectful of Menger. Menger is a great guy, except for his separate great insights. However, unfortunately, he's got an incorrect theory of interest, the theory of interest is the so-called use theory.
But somehow, and he explains it in a very usual lucid, bring it in a lucid manner,
Menger somehow believed that when you buy capital goods, when you buy factors of production, you also pay a price for them, as Roger said today.
But you're also doing something else, you're also paying an extra surplus for the use of the factors of production, for the disposing of the factors of production.
And Menger very carefully, page after page, said, look, there's no difference between the use of something and the thing itself.
You buy something, you buy the uses of it. That's the whole point. You buy a machine, you buy only uses of the machine. There's no extra use payment in addition to the payment of the machine.
Very beautifully and loosely and carefully, he demolishes Menger. Obviously Menger doesn't like to be demolished. There are very few people in the history of social thought who love being demolished. There might be one or two here and there, but I don't know of them.
And I think that's it. I don't think the argument is over equilibration. I think the argument is over use theory.
And that, of course, brings in the time preference theory of interest.
And somebody asked Roger, why did von Boehm-Bawerk reintroduce it?
I really don't know that. It's a famous puzzle in history of thought.
Von Boehm-Bawerk's volume one, Capital and Interest, is a total demolition of a productivity theory.
My only quarrel with von Boehm-Bawerk is a little unfair, he's unfair to two of us, no question about that.
What he does is, his strategy was, here he's writing the definitive interest theory, capital and interest theory.
He started by smashing everybody before you.
The Austrian Theory of Bum-Bawerk and the Seminar of Carl Kniece on Turgot's Theory of Interest
8 years later, to publish the book, he dismisses it as just physiocratic nonsense, about land-fructification.
So something happened there, something in the 8 years, and I think it just didn't fit his strategy, so to speak.
At any rate, this unpublished work, which I'd love to see translated and published someday, is in the possession of F.A. Hayek.
Von Bawerk's widow gave it to Hayek, Young Hayek, in 1919 or something, and it's still somewhere in Hayek's repository.
That's something, it's another research project for you.
So von Bawerk then establishes the time preference theory and beautifully demolishes, there's no extra surplus,
there's a difference between the productivity of capital and the reason why there's a price of capital goods,
the interest payment of the time discount, and for some strange, crazy reason in volume two he brings it back.
Not only does he bring back productivity, he makes it the most important element.
So it's a total contradiction between his volume one and volumes two and three.
Frank Federer's contribution was to demolish von Bawerk in turn, saying this doesn't work,
and established the so-called pure time preference. The reason why we call it pure is because there's been all these admixtures, impure admixtures of productivity theory and all sorts of other stuff.
We're trying to distill the purity, pure causal factor.
A couple of famous problems of von Boehm-Bawerk, alleged problems.
Again, I think the reason why von Boehm-Bawerk has been particularly attacked by the nihilist forces in modern industrial economics is because he's obviously clear, he's obviously equilibrating, he's obviously part of a great economic tradition.
Mises built his theory on it. Mises is an elaboration of von Bawerk, an application to the theory of money.
If you eliminate von Bawerk, you're also implicitly eliminating Mises, to cut the ground out from under Mises.
It's a strategic ploy on the part of the nihilist forces.
The thing about the nihilists is they don't like Mises, they don't like von Bawerk. Who are they going to like if they call themselves Austrian?
The only Menger is the only one left, and he's far enough in the past to be safe, I suppose.
One alleged problem with Bombardier always comes up, so I'm going to talk about that,
is why is it that an increase in saving and investment always lengthens the structure of production?
Why is it always a more roundabout production process? Why can't it be in a short production process?
The answer is very simple. I like to call it, you have a little grid here, two by two grid.
This, of course, is simplifying the picture, but I think you'll see the story here.
Here you have production processes, less productive and more productive.
I mean, in reality, of course, there's a whole spectrum of productivity, I'm making it a two by two grid here.
And here we have shorter, in other words, coming early and longer.
Well, if a process is very short, it takes you like five minutes, and very productive, it's going to be used already, it's not a problem.
It's like monodropping from heaven, if you have monodropping from heaven, or the shmoo, if you remember the early al cap,
the shmoo is infinitely productive, can be used for anything. Obviously, you're going to snap it up, I mean, it's already going to be used.
So that is no longer a part of human action. Whatever is there has already been used up, okay?
On the other hand, if a process is very long and produces almost nothing, it's not going to be used at all. Only morons would use it.
In other words, if you've pictured 50 years to produce one widget, you're not going to do it, if you know it, if you have any brains at all.
So this is out of the picture too. If you leave out, you toss out the long, unproductive processes and the short, very productive processes, you're left with two things.
You're left with short, less productive processes versus longer, more productive.
And so when you save and invest, you decide when you're going to give up early consumption and up for a longer but more productive process.
So that's why more saving investment is always a longer process of production. It's very simple if you look at this grid work.
And of course, you've got the time structure of production, wonderful analysis of capital and interest.
Another thing I should say about Menger and Boehm-Bawerk and the media they were involved in, it's not an accident.
I think it's no accident that the value climate, the epistemological value and value climate in Austria is completely different than it was in Germany and Britain, namely, in short, Austria was Catholic and always had been Catholic whereas northern Germany was Protestant and England of course was Protestant.
And what this meant in epistemological and value terms is that in Austria they still continued to read Aristotle in the high schools until very late, certainly by the time Menger and von Boehm-Bawerk were growing up.
They were steep in natural law, natural rights, and ______ epistemology in general. Northern Germany and England and Britain were influenced by Calvinism and Protestant evangelicalism, which tossed out the so-called scholastic method.
And in addition to that, of course, Aristotle was not read. Hegel, of course, was Protestant. There was some form of Protestant.
So we have the Austrians speak on a very different tradition, religious and philosophical tradition, on either the Germans or the British.
And the new book edited by Barry Smith, the very interesting thing about that is he points out his best article there is one by Smith himself on the philosophical climate of Austrian economics.
He points out, not just that they're reading Aristotle, but the big philosopher of Austria was Franz Brentano, who was an Aristotelian realist, the lead guy I read all the time, all over the place in Austria,
and also points out that Menger's principle, he has paragraphs from Menger and paragraphs from Brentano showing they're almost identical in their basic epistemology,
their view of natural law, their view of the essences of the so-called exact law, the essences of action, the connected cause and effect.
All these things were very close to Brentano. They knew each other, by the way. They interacted a lot. Their value theories were quite similar, too.
The subjective value theory of Brentano was quite similar to that of Menger.
So there was a tremendous interaction between Menger and von Bawerk people on one hand and the Brentano people on the other.
In Britain, they had an even worse situation, from my point of view.
Then we have Calvinism rampant, which was, first of all, dominant in Adam Smith.
I don't think it's an accident that Adam Smith tossed out short-run consumer value.
have usury laws, the channel saving and typical productive investment, and also the emphasis
of course on labor pain as the real basis of value. It's true that Ricardo was not Calvinist,
but James Mill was Ricardo's control, that's a strong term, but I think more and more believed
James Mill was the real heart of Ricardianism. James Mill was a Scottish Calvinist and by the
whole doctrine of Scotland came to England and then continued it. John Stuart Mill of course was his
John Stuart Mill reestablishing this whole doctrine, and with Marshall as Calvinist moralism
constantly thrown out, there's always constantly shoving in stuff about the importance of thrift
and all that sort of stuff.
There's some of the neo-Calvinism red lines throughout the book.
And I don't think it's an accident that people who are neo-Calvinist types don't like to talk about consumers,
because consumers are fickle and they spend and they're luxurious and they're sinful anyway.
Whereas pain and hard work and thrift is really good stuff.
I don't know of any labor theory or value of a person who was not brought up in the British tradition.
Marx of course was an economic laborer, a cardian.
I'd say I think von Boehm-Bawerk, despite his peccadilloes and bringing back productivity, the key person in the development of the theory of capital interest, I recommend reading him. I think he's great. I love the slow, patient demolition of the enemy. Magnificent.
I was promised a reference to Marx in this thing. Maybe I should have recommended some more of these readings, like Barry Smith and stuff, but I've just gotten finished with dealing with Marx in my own work, so let's say I just want to inflict the pain on other people.
The interesting thing about von Boehm-Bawerk's refutation of Marx, which of course is a famous refutation which he
his review, so to speak, after the
theory of interest, he sort of
had the basis of it in his theory of capital interest, but after Marx's volume three of capital came out,
was put out by Engels, von Boehm-Bawerk does the ultimate demolition of it,
he was generally accepted by economists of the day, you're right, I mean really until this day,
Marx's economists are very weak on labor theory of value, they're not labor value theorists.
Even Joan Robinson and people like that, well of course we know labor theory is ridiculous, but
somehow exploitation anyway.
But that's really, of course, the guts of the economic aspect of Marxism, and it was essentially demolished by von Boehm-Bawerk.
Of course, by the way, the famous story here is a true story. In volume two of Capital, by the time Marx had died, Engels was engaged in this great work of
coming out and getting Marx's old notes together, getting them into a book form.
In volume two of Capital, on the preface,
Engels
teasingly sort of childlessly organize the game. Let's see how Marx is going to solve the great problem. The great problem, of course, is this,
of volume one of capital.
If profits come from exploitation of workers and profit rates are reduced,
then of course there's capital investment.
How is it that the profit rates are really about the same on the market?
So what's the story here? Why isn't it true that the profit rate in, say,
heavily capitalized industries is much lower
than a profit rate, say, in ditch digging, which should be very high?
And he said, well, in volume three, Marx will solve this great problem.
So he offered, Engel was offered a contest.
Let's everybody get to it and see how Marx solved it,
see if they can predict how Marx solved it.
And a lot of people, you know, engage in this contest.
Of course, there's no prize at the end.
But anyway, they came out with this,
how can you solve this insoluble problem?
In other words, you either have a labor theory value
or you give that up, or you give up the idea
that profit rates are equalized on the market.
It's difficult for the Marxist to give up either one.
Anyway, nobody solves it, supposedly.
It comes out with an alleged solution, which von Bawerk then riddles patiently point by point
and shows that Marxists essentially gave up, implicitly gave up labor theory of value
because they obviously had to admit that profits tend to be equalized on the market,
and therefore labor theory of value is shot.
Of course, Marx doesn't admit it, but he points out he has to admit it, etc., etc.
The interesting thing is the reaction of, I think many Marxists gave up the thing altogether, Achille Luria, kind of a sweet reaction to all this.
Luria was an Italian Marxist, didn't have to wait for von Bawerk's critique, he realized immediately when he read volume 3, the whole thing was shot.
And he was very bitter, because he had previously said that capital is the greatest book of all time, it's the fulcrum of all life or whatever.
When Volume 3 came out, Lorea said that this is the Russian campaign of Marx.
That was the analogy for Napoleon's Russian campaign.
He said that the end is suicide. He's had it. Marxism is finished.
The other Marxists who are trying to remain Marxists to this day, what they did is essentially change the Art League terms of the debate.
They said, well, Marx didn't mean that when he talked about value, he didn't mean prices.
He didn't mean influences on relative price. He meant something else.
He meant some kind of mystical embodiment of value.
It has nothing to do with the price system.
Marx thought he had something to do with prices. This is typical of Marx's reaction to criticism.
When Marx makes a prediction, for example, that workers are going to get worse and worse off until they finally revolt,
they're obviously not getting worse and worse off. Marx's reaction is, well, Marx didn't mean worse off.
He meant relatively worse off to wealthier people. You shift the terms of the debate.
You never be wrong. It's a non-philosophiable proposition.
So the Marxist reaction to all this, those who continue to be Marxist,
What Marx didn't mean meant values in some sort of mystical sense, values embodied by labor and nothing to do with prices.
Marx, I don't think, meant that, but this is the fullback position, this is the position of Hoferding, for example, of so-called reputation, of von Bawerk.
Mises tells the story about Otto Bauer, who was the leading Austrian Marxist for many years and a friend of Mises at least for a while,
and Bauer enrolled in von Bawerk's seminar for a couple of years in order to refute it, in order to refute von Bawerk's reputation of Marx,
The Finner of Equity, never did it.
And he admitted to Mises one time, well, you know, that's it, there's no reputation.
And they were very, very shot.
And one interesting thing is, sort of a footnote to this saga,
is that the most highly praised recent book on Marxism,
which was by Thomas Sowell, on Marxism,
also takes the Marxist line of von Bawerk didn't understand Marx and meant something else.
It's a strange book, but the sole book is essentially a pro-Marxist book, which has been built by propagandists as the definitive critique of Marxism.
If I leave that to you, it's a kind of interesting saga.
There's also a charming, there's a couple of charming quotes by Alexander Gray, my favorite humorous economic writer, ceramic economic thought.
He's going through all this stuff. He's a marvelous book called The Socialist Tradition. He's going through all the socialists.
He talks about the attempts of various Marxists to try to explain why Marx didn't really mean value. What did he really mean when he talked about value?
He takes off on G.D.H. Cole's book, which is called What Marx Really Meant, and tries to explain this, etc.
So here's a charming quote from Gray. This is a critique of Cole.
The identity of value in embodied labor was surely something Marx thought he had proved, which therefore required proof in the opening pages of Capital.
If the identity of value in labor is a matter of definition, as the Marx Neo-Marxists said in an assumption, then at least we know the meaning Marx attaches to value, but in that case, the pretended proof in the opening chapter is mere eyewash, since one states but does not prove definition, so the whole thing is simply a definition of what's valuable because I say it is, but why does he go through the whole book? Also in that case, he adds, it is to be feared that the whole of capital, resting on an arbitrary definition which implies the conclusion to be reached, is an example of wandering vainly in a circle, even more than the most critical critics of thought,
If, on the other hand, the identity of value and labor is a matter of proof and not of definition, we still have to grope the meaning of Marx's attachment to the word value.
To conclude with Ray, Marx's value theory, to witness von Bawerk or Mr. Joseph, H.W.B. Joseph wrote a book on labor theory, value and Marx,
to witness von Bawerk or Joseph carving up Marx is but a pedestrian pleasure.
For these are but pedestrian writers, who are so pedestrian as to clutch at the plain
meaning of words, not realizing that what Marx really meant, Cole, has no necessary
connection with what Marx undeniably said.
To witness Marx surrounded by his friends is, however, a joy of an entirely different order,
for it is fairly clear that none of them really knows what Marx really meant, and even a considerable
doubt as to why he was talking about, there are hints that Marx himself did not know what
In particular, there's no one to tell us what Marx's story meant by value.
I think that's a sense of last word on Marx, because I think that's the whole other saga.
The entire Marxian canon is essentially a prophetic religious movement of a weird kind.
What I'm advocating here is essentially back to Boehm-Bawerk, I'm going to put that on a sloganeering term.
Boehm-Bawerk has been denigrated, he's essentially fulfilled the Mangerian mission,
Commission, and applied Hungarian-Austrian economics to capital and interest, and successfully,
so I think. And then Federer, of course, I'm going to add him to the arrow here, and then
Mises. So I think that's basically what I want to say in the lecture in a few minutes,
but I'm going to wrap it up now and go over questions. Thank you.
My question is, is that von Boehm-Bawerk was, and Mises had a little, had different approaches and feelings about governmental bureaucracy.
Do I have, that Mises essentially was more tolerant of it?
More tolerant?
More tolerant of it.
More tolerant of bureaucracy?
I think they're pretty similar, I mean, von Boehm-Bawerk, as you say von Boehm-Bawerk, he was not a pure academic, Menger too was a civil servant, a member of parliament.
Von Boehm-Bawerk was a minister of finance, I think Menger was a minister of commerce for a few years.
Von Boehm-Bawerk was a minister of finance several times, he sort of alternated a seminar, a professorship in the ministry of finance.
He was the one responsible for going with the gold standard, and generally a free market type, and I think he didn't engage in political, economic analysis as much as Mises did.
Mises Institute, basically I think in the same area, and one of the, one of the, one
of the other von Boehm-Bawerkian mysteries, there's no life, of course, there's no biography
of Menger and there's no biography of von Boehm-Bawerk, okay, there's no other research
projects, there's nothing, and one of the, von Boehm-Bawerk died fairly young, died immediately
after World War I broke out, and the story is he might have committed suicide, well,
Mises Institute thinks he was very depressed because of the wars that meant the end of
Western civilization, probably his concern, and there's also a story he might have committed
The whole world is falling apart. Indeed, it was falling apart. Classical liberalism, peaceful world, peaceful Europe, and so on.
I think their views are fairly similar. I don't think that Mubarak didn't have much time to spend, much except these three-volume work and the different editions of them, various journal articles.
A couple of things about Menger. Hayek mentions in his introduction to the principles that Menger was an activist in the Liberal Party. Maybe that will help give us an indication of his policy.
Why am I not sure? I guess liberalism was many things. It could be laissez-faire liberalism or it could be some sort of Mubbering moderate. I'm not sure, I'm not even sure.
I'd say Streisberg claims he was a hardcore laissez-faire liberal.
There's a book called The Gold Standard, edited by Lew Rockwell, that brings out Menger's position on the gold standard, which is not only favored because it's limited to the expansion of the state.
That part was probably true.
But he also has some status remarks in his book on money.
So he is evidently somewhat of a mixed bag in that respect.
Who is he outbush?
The fellow who wrote in the Barry Smith book on Menger's political theory, political views,
keeps talking about the Austrian political theorists.
E-O-T-V-O-S was about freedom lives.
I'm not sure how you pronounce it.
But he sounded pretty status to me.
Manger and Rudolf have co-operated an anonymous political pamphlet that was very hardcore in that status, was it fair?
I wonder if you might say a few words about Wieser and how it is that he got the somewhat odd views, at least for an Austrian, that he did.
Well, he was a Fabian Socialist. Rick Steves was also a Fabian, although he certainly doesn't write like one. He writes like a hardcore market person.
And he also used, I think perhaps the first one to use the idea of the Pigou idea that since you have a diminishing marginal utility of money,
somehow this means that you should have a progressive income tax to maximize general social utility. I think the origin of that.
I'm not sure why he deviated or whatever. Again, of course, there's no biography of him either.
I don't know. I know Mises and his notes of recollection are very bitter about Wieser.
And I didn't think he was worth much at all. As a matter of fact, when Hayek was first introduced himself to Mises,
he had a level of recommendation from Wieser, which almost killed Hayek's chances in Mises.
Not quite, but it was not considered a positive recommendation.
There is a section in volume 2 of von Boehm-Bawerk's book, called The Law of Costs, in which he elaborates on the cost-production view of price determination, and he says that it is possible to reconcile this with the demand-utility approach.
So you reconcile the backward looking toward the past, price determination with the looking toward the future view.
Well, the costs are looking to the future. The costs are the expected productivity of the factor to the consumers.
So in other words, the costs are also a subjective concept.
I didn't think he was using that version of cost. I think he was using the classical version
of cost as monetary outlet. And I'm not quite sure how he's able to tie them together.
I think he used this version of Coarse. I realize that was developed more over time, but I think he was basically an opportunity Coarse Austrian.
That's certainly Jevons, to the extent he wrote about it, was.
Larry White says that von Bawerk was distinctly not a praxeologist and that Mises' work in methodology was to some extent a repudiation of his mentor.
Well, why didn't Mises ever say it? Mises was not reluctant to talk about what his views were. There was nothing in Mises that he repudiated from Barber quite the opposite. He always hailed him as his predecessor.
The whole style of Boehm-Bawerk's presentation is really logical.
It's kind of logical deduction reading his book.
It's like he starts from scratch and then builds things.
It's just ridiculous to think that there is any kind of principle difference between the two,
even though Boehm-Bawerk did not write much on methodology.
He has some remarks for various places, but there is no indication.
In fact, there's a beautiful book by Boehm-Bawerk. Actually, one of the problems with Boehm-Bawerk is that I realize that the Smart translation is the first edition.
And so, the Xenholz translation is the third edition. But I think, I don't know German that well, but I know Smart was a much better English writer than English.
Boehm-Bawerk on the Smart edition is a great writer, and his flow is beautifully. So I don't know whether it's the Smart himself, or was himself a good writer, or whatever.
But I would recommend reading that, to get the flow of Boehm-Bawerk, step by step. Everything fits together.
Could you briefly explain the difference between Menger, Boehm-Bawerk, and Mises, and Lachmann's notion of capital, and how Lachmann's notion of capital and structural production made sense?
How does this relate to the nihilist view?
Well, Lachman's book, Capital and its Structure, is basically a bombardment of Misesian's book.
It's the early Lachman's book, Lachman 1.
And that's a fine book, I don't know, I'm all for it. It talks about how the stock market fits into all this.
Shares of titles to capital fit into the whole structure of allocating resources in the best manner, etc.
This book is essentially a Boehm-Bawerk-Misesian book.
What happened was that Lachman, sometime after that, discovered Shackle and nihilism and then became a Shack-Helian.
So that's, you know, it's Lachman 2.
There's not much you can say about that except it's institutionalist.
It's nihilist and institutionalist. There are no economic laws.
You can't predict the future. You don't know what's going on. It's all sort of chaotic.
Well, kaleidic, as Lachman likes to put it.
And that's about it. I mean, that's kind of a boring thing in a sense.
Murray, earlier he said that he thought that Boehm-Bawerk was unfair to Trivgo.
and period and you sort of wipe out a little economics. But I think I don't see much, I think
Boehm-Bawerk definitely, he's more of the Misesian, praxeological tradition than Menger in a sense of
step-by-step analysis and everything flowing logically. Murray, earlier you said that he
thought that Boehm-Bawerk was unfair to Trigga. Would you say something similar to that about
What about his treatment of Cassell and the notion of weighting and all that was...
I don't know. I didn't really focus on it. I know Cassell was sort of an aggregativist type, kind of a fissured type.
But it also didn't have the sort of the array view of price index view, etc.
And it might have been. It was, you can't...
As I say, he had this idea that everybody before him has to be demolished.
And once in a while, demolish is something unfairly.
And it might be the only one that didn't do that with John Ray.
But of course, John Ray was discovered after he wrote his first edition.
And in 1903 or whatever, he came out with the edition.
And then he hailed John Ray as his great predecessor.
So by that time, he sort of established his strategy for the first volume.
If the paper favorable to Turgo is still in Hayek's basement, how is it known that von Boehm-Bawerk was so favorable in the beginning?
Hayek disposes what he said, and Hayek reported this, and then he hails Turgow's interest theories and predecessors of his own work.
So, it's in the Turgow edition. The marvelous English translation of all of Turgow's economics works by Grunewagen, he's got that in there, reporting this from Hayek.
So I could see Hayek disgorge this or this thing or whatever and get this, get a translator or whatever. It should be fascinating.
Yeah?
I think there seems to be nothing else on Menger and Barber. I think you're being a little unfair to Tom Sowell's book about Marxism.
I think that Sowell's point about Marx and the labor definition of it, in fact I think Tom states specifically in this book that
Marx did not give a labor theory of value, he gave a labor definition of value, and this is a bit of controversy, and given that Marx is in many cases not sufficiently coherent to be termed right or wrong, I think that you are being a little bit unfair to me.
I think I'm being not fair enough, because he says that these other guys never cite Marx directly, Samuelson and so forth, and he said Marx never has a labor theory, he doesn't mention the word labor theory of value.
And of course he did, and as a review of my David Ramsey Steele International Philosophical Quarterly points that out.
I think the Conway book is infinitely better as an introduction to Marx than Sol is.
I think what happens in the Sol book, if you read the Sol book carefully, you'll find out that the citations are almost all about early before 1963.
The Modern Marxists, do they tend to defend this labor theory value or reject it?
It seems like there's a big problem, either way. If they defend it, then, predictably, they'll say very silly things, but if they reject it, then it just seems without rudder. Everything collapses.
Basically, they tend to reject it.
But what's in place?
I don't know. It speaks to me.
The overall social philosophy.
The evolution of mankind through this stage of feudalism, periodism, socialism, all the rest of it. That they try to rescue.
To my knowledge, there's hardly any Marxist who will defend labor theory or value, even though they all recognize that that is the core of Marxism.
There was one at NYU, I can't think the name.
Becker.
Becker. He proudly defended the labor theory of value.
There's pretty few and far between.
I can't remember what he said.
Basically, they fall back into the general sociology or whatever, alienation, of course, is a big one, and the labor theory gets shunted aside somewhere.
But it's interesting, because Marxism tends to flourish not in economics, but in other softer disciplines, literature, sociology, all these benighted areas, where it flourishes, and economics is really fairly free of it.
But even in the communist countries, the leading forces giving up Marxism than the economists, Yugoslavia, Hungary, etc., are always in the forefront of abandoning the whole damn thing and going on to some sort of market.
In Germany, I would say that too. Among economists, you don't find Marxists. I mean, not Marxists in the sense that they think that that is the philosophy that they use as their guideline or whatever.
You find among sociologists, political scientists, German, English, literature, you name it, you got it, but economics outright Marxists on a rare occasion.
There's something about the discipline of economics, I think, that sort of puts a conservatizing influence in general.
You know, the fact that you can't eat your cake and have it at the same time is sort of self-discipline.
We're not really on a topic, but since we're on it, why don't you tell us a little bit about, like, since you just finished your work on Marx, why don't you give us a little crazy overview of Marx.
In the case of Marx, I thought, well, everybody knows about Marx, labor theory, value, and bingo.
And I found out, of course, there's a lot more to it.
And I had to plan my way to Hegel.
Well, that was something I do not wish on my worst foes.
At any rate, what I think of the essence of Marx is worse than we might think.
In other words, the whole thing is really religious doctrine.
It comes from, it starts off with the Christian heresy,
and the actual neoplatonic movement, Christian heresies in the early Christian period.
It continues on as an underground movement, the basis of which,
well, the two aspects of it, one is creatology, the science of how the universe was created,
or why did God create the universe.
This might seem many hear the esoteric topic, but they're just thinking of something like praxeology.
Theology, I find it very interesting, something like praxeology, one slip and you've had it.
In one slip you had the inductive chain, you make one slip somewhere in the early premises and you're sort of finished, you wind up with bizarre deviations.
So what happens, the Orthodox Christian view, which is a safe view, by the way, in all these areas, as far as I can see,
the Orthodox Christian view is God created the universe out of love for his creatures.
And there's no political implications or sociological implications from this.
Heretical view was that God created the universe because God was dissatisfied, was lonely or whatever, like imperfect.
So, you start off with the viewpoint, which starts, let's say, with Plotinus and the old Platonist goes down,
is that you start with the world where God and man are unified, and how man and God could be unified for creation,
I don't know, don't ask me to explain this, I can only report it.
So God and Man are sort of together one cosmic blob, but unfulfilled, imperfect.
Then God creates the universe as an act of desperation and trying to fulfill God's functions or soul or whatever.
And then you have creation. Creation becomes then, in this heretical Christian heresy view, an act of evil,
because what you have is you split the original unity of man and God.
Before that, man, God and nature, before creation, were unified. That was the great thing about it.
Then, with the creation of the universe, everything gets split into atoms and individuals and species and all the rest of it.
So man, the collective capital M, of course, the species, is now cut off from nature and cut off from God.
And it was individual men are cut off from each other because they're really a part of a collective blob.
So, at this point, the good thing, the bad thing about it is, this is where the concept of alienation comes in.
Alienation does not mean psychological disturbance because you don't like what's going on or something like that.
Human Action is a fundamental act of creation, involved in creation itself.
Man, God, and nature are alienated from each other.
So then what happens is, is that that way is a determined process by which God fulfills himself in some way,
man fulfills himself in a species development, and finally as an ultimate act,
the final end of the universe, eschatology, the last days,
where man and God rejoin each other in a great blob again, at this time at a higher level, known as the return.
What we want to say about this is very collectivist, because the individual means nothing. The individual person is nothing, just a cell in this great collective organism.
So when you say man is progressing, it means the species is progressing toward this higher level, an ultimate reunion with God.
What happens later as things develop, after the Christian period, middle ages, etc., is this gets pantheized with Hegel, the entire romantic period of pantheization of this.
God drops out as a supernatural person, or being, or whatever, and you're left with this collective man, the species, then fulfilling, finding out that man and God are really the same thing.
And that's the ultimate consciousness ever. You wind up with a cosmic blob. This time, God has dropped out. Man and God are the same thing. You have a sort of pantheistic thing. They're always one.
This is the end of history, the end of the universe. And the entire Romantic period, by the way, is saturated with this crap.
There's a wonderful book by M.H. Abram, which I recommend everybody, called Natural Supernaturalism, which analyzes the world of Romantic literature and philosophy, basically.
Wordsworth and Coolridge and Hegel and Schleiermacher and Schlegel and Schiller and all these people, mostly German and English, they all have this viewpoint, more or less.
Down to D.H. Lawrence, by the way, the idea that they have this species development winding up at the end of alienation and everything is great and perfect as the end of history as the man is reintegrated with nature and God and the rest of it.
So what you have with Marx is an atheist version of this pantheism.
Hagell was a pantheist, Hagell was believing he himself was the final culmination, he was the ultimate god person because he invented the theory, so this makes him the world historical figure, and Marx atheized it, so instead of talking about god at all, you just have a collective species blob man, the capital M, so what you have is the final eschatology of course is the communist system where everything is then integrated, individuals are joined together in a collective blob which results in the end of history,
This is sort of an atheized version of a pantheized version of Christian or original Christian heresy or neoplatonic heresy.
And you have the apocalyptic, you know, final conflict where all these things, of course, there's a final conflict with good and evil or good triumphs over evil and you have a final, puts an end to history.
The oldest thing that makes, I wouldn't say it makes sense out of Marx, but you understand what he's talking about. He was involved in this kind of, the prophet of this doctrine.
If you look at his early poems, so-called early poems, they're even more interesting.
Early poems does not mean he was a kid of 12.
He was a graduate student. I figured if you're a graduate student, you're responsible for your own product.
He wrote these very interesting poems, which have been translated, most of them, and plays,
which are really hair-raising, because essentially he sets forth his program.
This is before he knew about the labor theory of value.
This is when he's ultimate sort of vision of the world.
The vision of the world was, and what he said was, explicitly was,
He hates the universe because God created it and it means that God is a greater person than he is.
Therefore, his goal is to destroy the universe, which fits in with the rest of his program.
So anyway, it's a fascinating study, you know, how can I leave this stuff out, right, as the book keeps growing and growing?
I think that's a sort of a capsulated version of the Marxian, of the Marxian vision.
And of course, first of all, and this is of course accepted, he becomes a communist,
and then he looks around for, in other words, he's got the, he becomes a communist,
Communism is the final goal. How do you bring it about?
If you have religion, if you have the second coming,
or the messiah comes, you have the mechanism.
Of course, Marx couldn't talk about a messiah,
so what's going to be?
You have to have some inevitable law of history
that determines the final outcome.
The rest of his life, he's searching for the economic forces.
How does this work? Why does capitalism inevitably lead to communism?
The final apocalyptic moment in the working class takes over.
He's trying to find the mechanism.
So the last 30 years of his life or whatever,
he's trying to figure out how it must work.
But the goal of communism was established from very early, 1844 or whatever, and the rest of us kind of spin out how the messianic ages are going to take place without the messiah.
It's difficult to do it, and I guess he tried nobly, or whatever you want to call it, and flopped.
Anyways, sort of a capsule of the view of it, yeah.
What's in Marx's view?
The early Marxists were usually a Freudian historian. This time he was very straight. He talked about the religious prophetic.
So we have now more stuff which is pretty good on all of this, analyzing it.
We've more or less transcended the idea of the early Marx and the late Marx.
There's one Marx, one bad guy, starting out with the communism of destruction and eschatology and trying to figure out how to work it.
And interestingly enough, the idea that there were two Marxists, the humanist type said, yes, the early Marx is great.
because the early Marx talks about freedom and alienation then he gets bad
because he talks about labor theory, value and economics too rational so this is the
new left Marxist and then you have the Stalinists like Althusser who said no no
the early Marx is crazy the late Marx is great because he's talking about economics and of
course the conclusion is there's only one Marx and it's all different aspects of
I think so. He doesn't even talk about the philosophic aspect much at all. I think he does, yeah.
I think I missed a minute ago. Where did the soul go wrong? What are the claims that soul makes?
Well, he thinks that Boehm-Bawerk did not refuse Marx, that Boehm-Bawerk didn't understand Marx, and that Marx didn't talk about prices and things like that.
And it doesn't really deal with much of any of this.
But Conway, on the other hand, is quite good. I mean, it's not perfect.
I think it deals with most of these, most of the problems.
Not so much of the religion aspect, but...
What do you mean, as far as where David ran the steel on the...
Oh, but it's a short review.
I mean, steel, he has the quote...
I mean, what is this, the...
Let's see here.
Where is the steel piece?
The International Philosophical Quarterly.
Let's see what the issue was.
It's June 1986, International Philosophical Quarterly.
It could be longer, but it's a nice short...
It's a short review, but it really spears them.
But so it said when the Marx Nowhere refers to a theory of value, despite numerous and undocumented interpretive literature to the contrary.
Well, Steele pointed out that there it is. I mean, he cited the exact quotes. So that was just one feature of it.
I'm sure Steele, if necessary, could work out a whole thing there, because he's got a lot to say about this old book of his, Bet Noirs.
Before Marx became a Hegelian, what was he doing?
What the Path is Toward the Allegedly Inevitable Communist
My question is, I've heard, and I can't remember where, a number of times that capital was really written by Hegel, and then Marx just...
Written by Hegel?
Had Marx put his name on it with Hegel.
In Engels, really in Engels.
Yeah, I don't know about that.
Well, I don't know. That's interesting.
Gary North has written a second edition of his book on Marxism, Marxism, Religion and Revolution.
And Gary North claims that Engels really did most of the work. He was a theorist and he revered Marx, because Marx had a PhD.
And Engels didn't. It's an early case of PhD-itis. I'm not sure about that. It's interesting speculation.
There's various views. Engels really was a real theorist.
There's other views. Engels was the bad guys, the view of the fifties or so.
Engels was the Stalinists, quote-unquote.
I'm not really sure. I mean, it needs more investigation if you're interested in investigating it.
Because the two were very close.
And while Engels was alive, he read everything Engels wrote and, you know, whatever.
So it was sort of like a joint product.
Also, there's a tendency to whitewash Marx by saying Engels was the bad guy.
Engels is a bad guy. For example, the dialectical materialism question is a part of Marxism
that Marxists don't like to talk about because the idea of dialectical materialism applies
to all of life. The cell negates the cell and that sort of stuff. It doesn't sit well
with most people. So the theory is, while Engels is a guy who's interested in Darwin
and biology and things like that, Marx wasn't. It turns out Marx was just as interested.
So, I don't know, it's interesting, my area of speculation.
Mark sent his work, he asked Darwin if he would be allowed to dedicate his work to him.
But Darwin never replied.
I have a question, but at least he didn't agree.
So, Mark's work was my own work.
Is this economics from his father-in-law?
He liked his father-in-law very much. He had a very close relationship and that was the explanation why, in spite of the fact that the family of Marx's wife was actually opposed to the marriage.
The only one out of the family who was in favor of the marriage of Marx, at this time, was his father-in-law. All the rest of it. He hated the fact that they were a nobility family, and all the rest of it, and Marx wasn't. And Marx, until the end of his life, was very proud of the fact that he had married a person of nobility.
That's why he also made tremendous efforts to hide that he also had the kids, because if you are married to a wife from nobility, that's not the kind of thing you do to her.
Why is it so hard to bury and what's the problem?
I mean that does happen of course, people get converted out of Marxism quite frequently, but I guess it's a good spot to end the session. Thank you very much.