The problem with Marx and Aristotle is that Marx took up Aristotle’s quantophrenia.
http://mises.org/daily/2054#1.8
"Another grave fallacy in the same paragraph in the Ethics did incalculable damage to future centuries of economic thought. There Aristotle says that in order for an exchange (any exchange? a just exchange?) to take place, the diverse goods and services “must be equated,” a phrase Aristotle emphasizes several times. It is this necessary “equation” that led Aristotle to bring in the mathematics and the equal signs. His reasoning was that for A and B to exchange two products, the value of both products must be equal, otherwise an exchange would not take place. The diverse goods being exchanged for one another must be made equal because only things of equal value will be traded.
The Aristotelian concept of equal value in exchange is just plain wrong, as the Austrian School was to point out in the late nineteenth century. If A trades shoes for sacks of wheat owned by B, A does so because he prefers the wheat to the shoes, while B’s preferences are precisely the opposite. If an exchange takes place, this implies not an equality of values, but rather a reverse inequality of values in the two parties making the exchange. If I buy a newspaper for 30¢ I do so because I prefer the acquisition of the newspaper to keeping the 30 cents, whereas the newsagent prefers getting the money to keeping the newspaper. This double inequality of subjective valuations sets the necessary precondition for any exchange."
@Izzy
Hilferding was always a marxist, but he realized how wrong marx was in reality. I think the other poster wanted to say that he had influence from Bohm Bawerk though. Schumpeter probably had influence from Hilferding; not the other way around. Hilferding, and Lenin, knew that corporations wouldn’t topple the governemnt, but take it over. A point Marx didn’t see.
Thanks for clearing up my poorly worded sentence Jacob.
As for Hilferding on influencing Schumpeter:
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=1834324&show=html
Dude, that is a legit paper. It fascinates me that people focus on Marx despite his own followers recognizing his flaws very early on and addressing them in further theorizing the ideas.
To be honest I did ask you to read it to answer a critique, if that had been my purpose then I would have asked you to read the next chapter in which Mises position is explained. I was mainy interested in Lavoie’s interpretation of Marx from a Marxist perspective. However it seems that you agree with the substantive points, given that you anticipated & endorsed the main focus of his interpretation(what Marx thought of the nature of future socialist society)
‘‘This isn’t a problem for Communism really, as it is de-centralised to a degree’’
As I alluded to above If you want to know why this is wrong just read the next chapter ‘Mises’s challenge: the informational function of rivalry’
“As I understand Marx was very much an Aristotlean as well.”
Where did you hear that?
“I think, if you consider society as a whole, all of these predictions will have held.”
Class polarization toward proletariat and bourgeois has not happened.
The immiseration of the proletariat toward complete alienation has not happened.
The concentration of industry and capital has not happened.
Historical materialism is just like ever other dialectical model that has tried to be hoisted onto the annals of history. It can be disproved in its predictions and its interpretations.