This is a critique, within political philosophy, of Marx's macro-theoretic predictions (liquidity crisis, declining rate of profit, competitive elimination, underconsumption, and rising working-class consciousness) and of the micro-theoretic labor theory of value underlying his theory of exploitation. The core argument is that Marx's predictive claims failed empirically because he underestimated the capitalist state's capacity to manage crises, and that his labor theory of value is analytically indefensible because it arbitrarily isolates living labor as the sole source of value while ignoring the contributions of capital, prior ("dead") labor, and unpaid domestic labor—an point sharpened by the "corn theory of value" counterexample, which shows the same mathematical structure of exploitation can be derived from any input necessary to production, revealing exploitation to be a moral rather than a purely technical or objective category. The chapter concludes that what remains defensible in Marxism is not its theory of value but its underlying argument about power and compulsion: class is best understood not via a calculus of value-contribution but via the coercive necessity of selling one's labor power to survive.
This is a critique, within political philosophy, of Marx's macro-theoretic predictions (liquidity crisis, declining rate of profit, competitive elimination, underconsumption, and rising working-class…