INTRODUCTION

Capital I was published in 1867. That date marks the end of classical economics. It is generally agreed that modern economics was born around 1870, with the almost simultaneous achievements of Jevons in England, Walras in Switzerland, and Menger in Austria. Political bias apart, Marx's economic theory fell on deaf ears because it came at the wrong time. After his death it kept on a separate existence, interacting little with the mainstream of economic thought and undergoing little development. There were spurts of activity in the 1930s with the development of Keynesian Marxism, and then again in the 1960s with the successful Marxist refutation of a central part of neoclassical economics, as the mainstream has come to be called. These achievements did not, however, create a set of problems, theories, and concepts with a momentum of their own. Today Marxian economics is, with a few exceptions, intellectually dead. This, to be sure, is a subjective opinion. If one were to go by objective, quantitative facts, one would conclude that Marxian economics is flourishing. One observes all the normal signs of academic activity: specialized journals, “invisible colleges,” appointments at major universities. Moreover, the technical rigor and mathematical sophistication of modern Marxian economics have done away with some of the obscurantism that used to reign unchallenged. It turns out, however, that it is possible to be obscurantist in a mathematically sophisticated way, if the techniques are applied to spurious problems.