Workers are irreconcilably pitched in a class struggle against their employers in capitalist society, and so each of them is bound to adopt tainted ideologies which, while false, have the purpose of operating through them to serve their class interests.
Truth lies only with the proletarian science, and thus Marx did not have to refute his ideological opponents-merely unmask them as bourgeois.
"No matter how one looks at it," writes Mises, "There is no way in which a false theory can serve a man or a class or the whole of mankind better than a correct theory." Marx never attempts to explain why an ideological distortion would help someone serve their class interests better than the truth.
What's more, the labor theory of value which he had hinged his philosophy upon, adapting it from J.S. Mill, David Ricardo, and Adam Smith, had been overturned by economists Carl Menger and William Stanley Jevons only four years after Marx published the first volume of his magnum opus, Das Kapital, in 1867.
Marx dismissed them with ridicule, calling them "Vulgar economists" and "Sycophants of the bourgeoisie." Bootlickers sucking up to the ruling class.
Mises notes a bit of a contradiction here too, since, at the same time as Marx dismisses classical economists for being impelled by their bourgeois background, their promarket prejudice, he also borrows from them to reach antimarket conclusions.
Marx attacks the arguments made in favor of capitalism as ideological Mises asks, Why would the capitalists even need to justify capitalism if, according to Marx's own theory, every class is "Remorseless in the pursuit of its own selfish class interests"? Sure, if they were ashamed of their role as "Robber barons, userers, and exploiters," they wouldn't be able to look themselves in the mirror.
Truth lies only with the proletarian science, and thus Marx did not have to refute his ideological opponents-merely unmask them as bourgeois.
"No matter how one looks at it," writes Mises, "There is no way in which a false theory can serve a man or a class or the whole of mankind better than a correct theory." Marx never attempts to explain why an ideological distortion would help someone serve their class interests better than the truth.
What's more, the labor theory of value which he had hinged his philosophy upon, adapting it from J.S. Mill, David Ricardo, and Adam Smith, had been overturned by economists Carl Menger and William Stanley Jevons only four years after Marx published the first volume of his magnum opus, Das Kapital, in 1867.
Marx dismissed them with ridicule, calling them "Vulgar economists" and "Sycophants of the bourgeoisie." Bootlickers sucking up to the ruling class.
Mises notes a bit of a contradiction here too, since, at the same time as Marx dismisses classical economists for being impelled by their bourgeois background, their promarket prejudice, he also borrows from them to reach antimarket conclusions.
Marx attacks the arguments made in favor of capitalism as ideological Mises asks, Why would the capitalists even need to justify capitalism if, according to Marx's own theory, every class is "Remorseless in the pursuit of its own selfish class interests"? Sure, if they were ashamed of their role as "Robber barons, userers, and exploiters," they wouldn't be able to look themselves in the mirror.
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