Geographer/social theorist David Harvey offers a complete package of lectures on the first volume of Capital here. I mentioned earlier the blogospheric fisticuffs between Harvey and Brad DeLong, and I'm glad that Professor Harvey's lectures are available online. We start discussing Marx in Classical & Marxian Political Economy tomorrow, and while I want to read The Bearded One as sympathetically as possible, I can't escape the conclusion that the marginalist/subjectivist critique originating with Bohm-Bawerk destroys the entire Marxian system. In fairness to Marx, he derived his erroneous value theory from Adam Smith and David Ricardo, but in fairness to the classical economists, they did not try to build an entire theory of history and social change on so sandy a foundation as the proposition that labor alone is the source of value. As I read Adam Smith, his endorsement of the "obvious and simple system of natural liberty" does not derive from his value theory.

One of my undergraduate professors said that Marx's economics was "stillborn," and the more Marx I read the more I am persuaded that one has to say the same about all that his economics implies--which is to say, his entire system. Nonetheless, my intellectual life is richer as a result of having dealt with Marx in some detail as I've prepared for this semester and for the next few weeks of class. Here, though, is Murray Rothbard's assessment, with which I'm inclined to agree (from p. 433 of Classical Economics):

"Thus, Karl Marx created what seems to the superficial observer to be an impressive, integrated system of thought, explaining the economy, world history, and even the workings of the universe. In reality, he created a veritable tissue of fallacies. Every single nodal point of the theory is wrong and fallacious, and its 'integument'--to use a good Marxian term--is a web of fallacy as well. The Marxian system lies in absolute tatters and ruin; the 'integument' of Marxian theory has 'burst asunder' long before its predicted 'bursting' of the capitalsit system. Far from being a structure of 'scientific' laws, furthermore, the jerry-built structure was constructed and shored up in desperate service to the fanatical and crazed messianic goal of destruction of the division of labour, and indeed of man's very individuality, and to the apocalyptic creation of an allegedly inevitable collectivist world order, an atheized variant of a venerable Christian heresy."