The last Marxist isn’t born yet. No matter the evidence against the theories, both practical and more paper-bound versions, there will always be those that will pick up and promote the ideology. Here, I will showcase two such persons and give a free market look on snippets of their work.

Wacky World of Marxist Math

There are few people that take the Marxist school of economics as serious as Richard Wolff does. He has worked with the source material for about the same amount of time that Karl Marx himself did (if not more!), making his dedication to his craft very impressive.

Sadly, he repeats the same mistakes in regards to entrepreneurship as all Marxists must do, since it’s built into the code to view the entrepreneur the same as the Feudal Landlord and mistake every single employer as a Monopolist.

The Exploitation Theory put forth by Karl Marx, even in its most stripped-down and bare-bones form, requires that you have to assume (at least) two very specific things:

• Every wage laborer knows a craft or task well enough to get paid by someone else to do it, but can’t gather Means of Production/Capital themselves for some reason.
• Time perspective and preference only matter when working with the theory, everywhere else they have to be ignored or the whole thing will be bust. [1]

Here is a time stamped link to one of Richard Wolff’s lectures at Levy Economics Institute where he explains the general idea in very simple terms and in a very basic scenario. The Capitalist that Richard Wolff talks about in the linked lecture provides materials and sells the finished product on the market, and the compensation the Worker gets for participating in the production stage is a Wage, a paycheck.

In Wolff’s mind, and in Marxist theory, the Capitalist exploits the worker here but for this to be true we need both the assumptions met to make the theory work in favor of Marx/Wolff:

First off, the wage laborer would need an interest in gathering material herself before production, and to be able to sell the product post-production all by herself (or at the very least coordinate this, as the capitalist does), but not have an opportunity to do just that. Do finding a place to buy wood, glue, and a marketplace to sell in, sound unrealistic and far fetched in the 21st century?

Hardly. The marketplaces are too many, the means of production so cheap and credit so bountiful that it goes against reason to think like this. Was the case more difficult when Marx and Engels were writing? Perhaps. Now? No.

If the Wage laborer had an interest in not being a wage laborer and instead went the entrepreneurial route, there is a world of opportunities in this day and age to do just that. If she isn’t doing this, we have to assume that the risk is too high or the reward too small in the mind of the laborer and that cashing paychecks is preferable.

It is precisely the risk part that the Agorist necessarily must understand:

“The basic law of counter-economics is to trade risk for profit. Having done so, one naturally (acting to remove felt unease) attempts to reduce the risks. If you reduce your risks while others continue to face the higher risks, you naturally out-compete and survive longer. You profit.”

– Konkin, Agorist Primer p.46

The Agorist entrepreneur can reduce their risks in many ways, of course, but the most common ones are to make products that people want, peacefully, with higher quality and/or at a better price than the competition. Marxists, on the other hand, decrease the risk by playing Proletarian Dictators instead — by bending the market, workforce and capital to the political elites’ will as per the Leninist formula.

Moderate Dreams of a Proletarian Dictatorship

“We could only go from having islands of cooperative labor in a sea of wage labor to have a cooperative economic system if cooperative labor is developed by what Marx called national means, in other words political action”

– Ben Burgis, addressing his debate with Gene Epstein

When you have a centralized power structure with certain societal control mechanics that interest groups can turn on and off, you can approach it in 3 ways. The obvious neutrality that most people have some degree of is the most boring and bland one, but I can respect someone that wants to focus on doing more productive things with their time than digging too deeply into something you can’t really do that much about.

The second way is the anarchist one, the extreme negativity to the whole concept of monopoly on violence (the Weberian definition of the state). Here, Agorists are more consistent than other anarchists, with our understanding of all politics as violence and an opposition to party politics as a virtue – or even a Meme!

The third, and in my opinion worst, is of course the idea that if you take control over the structure and can dictate the mechanics, you’ll have the option to force everyone to follow your particular idea (because the opposition lost and you get to wear the big hat now). That is what ‘Political Action’ means if you boil it down to its core.

You just change the force to the aesthetics you prefer, but the system of force is still intact and oppressive. Which doesn’t concern the coming dictators, but for us that want a world where people are free to experiment with social and economic systems as they wish, it’s the enemy.

The idea of using an alternative economic system parallel to the mainstream one is the very core of Agorism, so it is very fun when someone is refuting the idea as “not enough to bring change,” when we have plenty of proof that it does foment change. Conversely, the very economic system the Materialist Marxist was trying to achieve in different corners of history (with elbow room for their specific flavor of Red that they can change at a whim — because True Socialism®) is the unicorn we will never see, the product we can never buy).

A secret contract between starving farmers in one part of Mao’s China changed the entire incentive structure, which in turn probably (and unfortunately) was the first seed toward what we see today in the form of Corporate Communism. The gray market distribution system in Soviet Russia kept people afloat, just as the black market of information does for today’s North Koreans.

How good is your economic system, really, if you need to take over the violent state-apparatus before it can be implemented? And after that you still need to keep everything air tight or the whole thing folds? As Konkin put it:

“No matter how many wish communism to work and devote themselves to it, it will fail.  They can hold back agorism indefinitely by great effort, but when they let go, the “flow” or “Invisible Hand” or “tides of history” or “profit incentive” or “doing what comes naturally” or “spontaneity” will carry society inexorably closer to the pure agora.”

– Konkin, New Libertarian Manifesto p.22

[1] We won’t take a deeper dive when it comes to Time here, but I’d recommend Böhm-Bawerks book “Capital and Interest” that does a great job of going through the time preference theory very well, building on Menger’s work.