Karl Marx and the Close of His System
1896
Summary
Böhm-Bawerk's definitive refutation of Marxian economics, exposing the fatal internal contradiction between Volume I and Volume III of Das Kapital. Marx claimed in Volume I that commodities exchange according to the labor embodied in them, yet in Volume III he conceded that prices of production diverge from labor values — a contradiction he never resolved. Böhm-Bawerk shows that the labor theory of value is not merely empirically wrong but logically incoherent, and that the exploitation theory built upon it collapses with it. Still considered the most rigorous classical-era critique of Marx.