<p>Who is saying Marx shouldn’t be taught? If for no other reason, he is an important part of understanding the history of economic thought. He’s one of the most misunderstood figures in history. Even his alleged followers barely understand what he was really teaching. Without a solid grounding in the classical economics of his day, you can’t hope to understand him. Unfortunately he is mostly taught these days by humanities professors who barely understand modern Econ 101 let alone classical economics, and who get many key aspects of his teachings wrong. And you certainly can’t look to people like Lenin or Trotsky for proper interpretations of Marx.</p>
<p>A few common errors you hear are:</p>
<p>1) Marx had a labor theory of value (he had a <em>definition</em> of value, not a theory, big difference)
2) Marx favored top-down socialism of the kind you saw in the Soviet Union and North Korea today (he didn’t favor ANY kind of forced socialism, rather he expected that socialism would emerge via voluntary action by individuals after capitalism went through the stages he predicted, he was expressly against it being forced on anyone)
3) Marx favored using education as government propaganda (he was against the government interfering in school curriculum)
4) Marx was 100% the opposite of capitalism as embodied by Smith, Ricardo, et al (he was no more “against” the free market than a lepidopterist is “against” larvae, he saw it as a necessary stage of societal development and recognized the improved prosperity that it brought)
5) Marx would be in favor of price controls (he and Engels both wrote against them, they understood how prices allocated resources, an essential component of the market economy)</p>
<p>While Marx had a brilliant mind, he was pretty much wrong on everything <em>original</em> he had to say about economics. I mean this in the nicest way. It’s true that Marx was right on some things, but those things he was right on were commonly taught by economists decades before Marx arrived on the scene.</p>
<p>By the time Marx had died and the volumes of Capital were being published, economics had completely passed him by via the Marginal Revolution. Even later communist economists, like Oskar Lange, considered him discredited. The basic problem was that Marx’s analysis of a market economy was wrong, which meant that all of the predictions which followed from that were wrong too. Marx was very specific about how he interpreted the workings of the free market and what he thought would happen, step-by-step, in the future of capitalism. But he turned out to be wrong because his precepts were wrong. Too much to go into here, especially since this isn’t a thread on Marx.</p>
<p>As for “capitalism stealing your identity,” while you can’t argue with a <em>definition</em> of “identity,” you can argue with the ramifications of the theory. And it has been empirically demonstrated time and again that freedom of expression and individuality are squelched under socialism and flourish under a free market.</p>