The Essential Rothbard - Ludwig von Mises Institute

120 The Essential Rothbard
But the flaw in Marx’s derivation does not lie only in the details
of his argument. A leitmotif of Rothbard’s work is that, as previously
mentioned, an exchange consists not of an equality, but
rather of a double inequality. Marx’s whole edifice thus rests on a
spurious assumption, and the three volumes of Das Kapital312 constitute
an elaborate attempt to conjure a solution to a nonexistent
problem.
But the difficulties of Marxist economics are not confined to its
starting point. Rothbard acutely notes that Marx’s theory of wage
determination really applies not to capitalism but to slavery:
Oddly, neither Marx nor his critics ever realized that there is
one place in the economy where the Marxist theory of
exploitation and surplus does apply: not to the capitalistworker
relation in the market, but to the relation of master
and slave under slavery. Since the masters own the slaves,
they indeed only pay them their subsistence wage: enough to
live on and reproduce, while the masters pocket the surplus
of the slaves’ marginal product over their cost of subsistence.
313
Rothbard does not confine his assault on Marxism to an
exposure of its economic fallacies. Behind the economics of
Marxism, he finds a heretical religious myth, the goal of which
is the “obliteration of the individual through ‘reunion’ with God,
the One, and the ending of cosmic ‘alienation,’ at least on the level
of each individual.” 314
One might at first think that abstruse theosophical speculations
that date back to Plotinus have little to do with Marxism. But
Rothbard convincingly shows that Marx, through the intermediary
of Hegel, presented a secularized version of this witches’ brew in
the guise of “scientific socialism.” In the course of doing so, Rothbard
makes Hegel’s philosophy seem amusing; his remarks on the
312 Karl Marx, Das Kapital (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1962).
313 Classical Economics, p. 393; emphasis in the original.
314 Ibid., p. 351.