Karl Marx and the Close of His System
Karl Marx and the Close of His System is Böhm-Bawerk’s critique, written after the posthumous Volume III of Capital appeared, of the internal coherence of Marx’s value theory.
What the Book Argues
Böhm-Bawerk’s charge is that Marx’s system contradicts itself between its first and third volumes. Capital Vol. I holds that commodities exchange in proportion to the socially necessary labor-time embodied in them — the labor theory of value. But Vol. III concedes that, under competition with differing capital compositions, commodities actually sell at “prices of production” (cost plus an average profit rate) that systematically diverge from labor-values. Böhm-Bawerk argues the later volume does not reconcile this with the first but abandons it: the “transformation” of values into prices either redistributes a total still fixed by labor (which the individual-commodity claim then fails to govern) or quietly replaces the labor theory with a cost-and-profit account. He reads this as the collapse (“close”) of the Marxian system’s value foundation.
Why It Matters in This Wiki
This is the wiki’s primary source for the Austrian critique of Marxian economics, and the value-theory complement to the exploitation-theory critique in Capital and Interest. It situates Böhm-Bawerk not only as a capital theorist but as the period’s most influential economic critic of Marx.
Provenance: the ingested raw is uncorrected Internet Archive OCR; confirm any quotation against the scan before using quote marks.
See Also
- Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk - the author
- Capital and Interest - the companion critique of the exploitation theory of interest
- The Subjective Theory of Value vs. the Labor Theory of Value - The clash between value as objective embodied labor (Marx) and value as the subjective, marginal importance imputed by acting individuals (Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, Mises).
- Capital - Marx’s 1867 magnum opus. Chapter 1 grounds value in abstract human labour and socially necessary labour-time — the objective labor theory of value the Austrians reject.
- Karl Marx - Author of Capital (1867) and the labor theory of value — value as socially necessary labour-time embodied in goods; the principal foil to the Austrian subjective theory of value.
- Capitalism - The economic system of private property, voluntary exchange, and free prices — social cooperation through the market — routinely confused with the very things it forbids: crony privilege, fraud