Marx did have a doctoral degree in philosophy (he wrote a dissertation on Democritus and Epicurus), and was for a period of time under the influence of Hegel (the decisive account of his break with Hegel is this one). But by the late 1840s, his approach to theory and intellectual work was wholly different. What revolutionary activity required was an account of how the socio-economic world worked, not a normative account of what people “ought” to do, an account that had no effect on practice. This approach figured centrally in the book on Marx that Jaime Edwards and I co-authored.

Our approach meets resistance from two directions: from “mainstream” philosophers and from “fringe” Marxist economists.

I was at an event awhile back with a fine “mainstream” philosopher interested in Marx, in which the philosopher said that the works of 1844 were the “philosophical” work because they were “normative.” Marx never published these, and as his frequent co-author Engels suggested, this was because he no longer saw them as relevant to political action. The idea that the early work is “real” philosophy is a symptom of the extent to which contemporary bourgeois philosophers think normative blather is the essence of philosophy (and also the extent to which they do not understand that Marx is a philosophical naturalist). If normative blather is “real” philosophy, then Anthony Appiah is the most real philosopher at work today!

Marx’s wide-ranging intellectual ambitions, especially in economics, attract scholars from all the affected disciplines. He also attracts a kind of religious zeal, slightly impervious to argument or evidence. Although most Marxist economists, in fact, realize that the labor theory of value is false (i.e., the socially necessary labor time does not explain what Marx called “production prices”), there remain some “true believers.” (The more honorable strategy, in a way, is Michael Heinrich’s, namely to deny that the labor theory of value is supposed to explain anything about prices–this runs afoul, alas, of Marx’s huge effort in volume III of Capital to try to explain production prices.) Fortunately, the “true believers” are marginal, even in Marxist economics. And as we show in Chapter 4 of our book, most of Marx’s most important claims about capitalism do not depend on the labor theory of value: this is, I think, one of the important contributions of the book.

Alas, this conclusion does not make the “true believers” happy. In one case, a benighted soul, who still believes in Marx’s theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (which depends on the labor theory of value), complained that we claimed supply-and-demand explained production prices (we did not) and that we denied that Paul Sweezy (despite the many merits of his account of Marxian economics) believed in the labor theory of value (we did not). It is not news to anyone that those in the grips of religious fervor are not the best readers. (This particular fanatic has been extensively critiqued by other Marxist economists.)

The good news is that views like the latter are “fringe” within Marxist economics; the bad news is that the moralized views of Marx (like the former) are “mainstream” among bourgeois philosophers. Marx’s work raises a host of fascinating philosophical questions even when one discounts the “normative” work he discarded, and that is what our book is about. What is Marx’s theory of history and the causes of socio-economic transformation? What are economic classes and in what sense do they have “interests”? What is an ideology, and how can people make mistakes about their own interests? That is philosophy enough for Marx.