The Mike Cody Four Mile Classic begins in about 40 minutes. It's my first race, and my goal is just to cross the finish line. I don't care if I'm walking (likely), running (unlikely), or crawling (possible) when the race is over as long as I finish it. I'll count it a double success if I win my bet with Bob.

So what will I be thinking about while I'm running, apart from "I can't beleive I signed up for this, I think my lungs are on fire, I want to die"? In getting ready for a couple of weeks of discussing Karl Marx, Adam Smith, and classical economics in Econ 323, I've been slogging through Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk's Karl Marx and the Close of His System, which is a systematic, point-by-point discussion of the fundamental incoherence of the Marxian system. Marx's "law of value" holds that the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of socially necessary labor needed to produce it. This also determines the ratio at which commodities are exchanged. Bohm-Bawerk systematically shows that this is inconsistent the fact that profit rates tend toward uniformity across industries. Either the law of value is true, or the tendency toward uniformity of profit is true, or both are false. They can't both be true. I recognize that Thomas Sowell disagrees with and criticizes Bohm-Bawerk's interpretation, but after reading Rothbard's chapters on Marxism in his Classical Economics, I'm inclined to believe that Bohm-Bawerk's critique is accurate.

In the twenty-first century, I'm not sure how much mileage we get as economists by beating up on Marx's economics. It's a dead horse, and we've known it for quite some time. After reading selections from Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, however, I'm more and more convinced that social-scientific analysis derived from Marxian principles is fundamentally flawed. Among the essays I've read ("Estranged Labour," "Private Property and Labour," "Private Property and Communism," "Human Needs and Division of Labour Under the Rule of Private Property," and "The Power of Money"), it appears that Marx's social theory rests on his value theory. Without his value theory, his claims about alienated labor, capital and money as the embodiments of alienated labor, and the power relations among classes are invalid (NB: Here's David Prychitko's article on Marxism in which he notes that Marx's theory of alienation is also weakened by the Austrian theory of knowledge and its role in society).

I'll be thinking about this while I'm running this morning. If anyone can direct me to cites arguing convincingly that Marx's social theory is fundamentally independent of his value theory and his economic analysis, I would be grateful.