Marxism feeds into the broader Classical Economists (Smith, Ricardo, and Keynes among others), which are different to the neoclassical economists. The neoclassical economists had a change in their theories of competition in the late 19th century so that competition was no longer seen as a brutal and gruesome dynamic, but a beautiful dance companies do in favor of the consumer, you. This ideological version of economics is known as “perfect competition”.
Perfect competition can be submitted to empirical tests. You can see whether capitalism leads to common prices, to lower costs, to companies with similar profit rates, etc. But what happens if you don’t find that? Do you start crying out loud “Imperfect competition!” ? You could, but that’s not what Marxism claims. Marxism claims that it is precisely competition that leads to differences in capital intensities (how much people invest in a particular company), differences in cost structures, in the regulation of profit rates, etc. And so it is as simple as testing the assumptions.
You can see how these assumptions are tested in Anwar Shaikh’s text Capitalism. It is a theory of capitalism that heavily draws upon Marxism (as well as the other classical economists I mentioned: Smith, Ricardo, and Keynes). What’s striking is that the Marxist assumptions (as well as the others) are always tested empirically. This is surprising because in my experience as a neoclassical economics student (which is the type of economics that’s taught everywhere except wherever they tell you what type of economics you’re learning —I’m being a bit cheeky here, but I also think I’m being accurate) and having read dozens of economics syllabus and textbooks, the neoclasical economics knowledge community in high school and undergraduate very rarely test the theories they are teaching you against the empirical evidence. Compare that to what you will find if you go to Anwar Shaikh’s website http://realecon.org and check our the free book lectures or the book itself.
There, not only will you find an absurd amount of evidence favoring Marxism (and more broadly the classical theory as well as real competition), but you will find that Marxism has strands that propose views that are very different to what other strands propose. For example, Lenin believed monopoly was capitalism’s future, but Shaikh doesn’t believe that. Nonetheless, you will find that Marxism is much more more empirically grounded than neoclassical theory.
Marxism feeds into the broader Classical Economists (Smith, Ricardo, and Keynes among others), which are different to the neoclassical economists. The neoclassical economists had a change in their theories of competition in the late 19th century so that competition was no longer seen as a brutal and gruesome dynamic, but a beautiful dance companies do in favor of the consumer, you. This ideological version of economics is known as “perfect competition”.
Perfect competition can be submitted to empirical tests. You can see whether capitalism leads to common prices, to lower costs, to companies with similar profit rates, etc. But what happens if you don’t find that? Do you start crying out loud “Imperfect competition!” ? You could, but that’s not what Marxism claims. Marxism claims that it is precisely competition that leads to differences in capital intensities (how much people invest in a particular company), differences in cost structures, in the regulation of profit rates, etc. And so it is as simple as testing the assumptions.
You can see how these assumptions are tested in Anwar Shaikh’s text Capitalism. It is a theory of capitalism that heavily draws upon Marxism (as well as the other classical economists I mentioned: Smith, Ricardo, and Keynes). What’s striking is that the Marxist assumptions (as well as the others) are always tested empirically. This is surprising because in my experience as a neoclassical economics student (which is the type of economics that’s taught everywhere except wherever they tell you what type of economics you’re learning —I’m being a bit cheeky here, but I also think I’m being accurate) and having read dozens of economics syllabus and textbooks, the neoclasical economics knowledge community in high school and undergraduate very rarely test the theories they are teaching you against the empirical evidence. Compare that to what you will find if you go to Anwar Shaikh’s website http://realecon.org and check our the free book lectures or the book itself.
There, not only will you find an absurd amount of evidence favoring Marxism (and more broadly the classical theory as well as real competition), but you will find that Marxism has strands that propose views that are very different to what other strands propose. For example, Lenin believed monopoly was capitalism’s future, but Shaikh doesn’t believe that. Nonetheless, you will find that Marxism is much more more empirically grounded than neoclassical theory.