Conza

In 1989 Robert Heilbroner, a distinguished quasi-marxist economist famously wrote in The New Yorker:

Less than 75 years after it officially began, the contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism has won… Capitalism organizes the material affairs of humankind more satisfactorily than socialism.

In a sense, to their lament, the marxists are not at all relevant. Here Rothbard prophetically addresses the confused intellectuals about what would be the next statist threat: “The coming struggle will be over interventionism, some kind of statism quasi-fascism… but the full socialism has had it.”

In 1992, Robert Heilbroner continued to explain the facts of life:

Capitalism has been as unmistakable a success as socialism has been a failure. Here is the part that’s hard to swallow. It has been the Friedmans, Hayeks, and von Miseses who have maintained that capitalism would flourish and that socialism would develop incurable ailments. All three have regarded capitalism as the ‘natural’ system of free men; all have maintained that left to its own devices capitalism would achieve material growth more successfully than any other system. From [my samplings] I draw the following discomforting generalization: The farther to the right one looks, the more prescient has been the historical foresight; the farther to the left, the less so.

And so it is with that I would like to introduce the following reading list for those who have asked several questions about Marxism and what it actually entails, since unfortunately they continue to stick around.

Readings:

• Ludwig von Mises - Marxism Unmasked , Socialism, Theory and History
• Yuri Maltsev - Requiem for Marx
• Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk - Karl Marx and the Close of His System
• Murray N. Rothbard - History of Economic Thought volume II
• Robert C. Tucker - Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx  [a technical piece on the philosophical foundations of Marxism, not for beginners]
• Leszek Kolakowski - Main Currents of Marxism [A three volume history of Marxism, perhaps the definitive work on its history]
• Alexander Gray - The Socialist Tradition, The Development of Economic Doctrine, [Highly recommended works on the subject]
• James Billington - Fire on the Minds of Men
• H.B. Acton [Not Lord Acton] - The Illusion of Epoch
• Various Authors - A Plea for Liberty. [A series of papers by various authors critiquing the beginnings of Fabian socialism by author Bernard Shaw, also some basic critiques of socialism in general]
• Hans-Hermann Hoppe - A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism
• Friedrich Hayek - Intellectuals and Socialism
• David Gordon - Resurrecting Marx

Lectures:

• Williamson Evers - ‘Marx and the Organization of Labor Under Socialism’
• Richard Ebeling - ‘Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk’s Critique of Karl Marx’
• David Gordon - ‘Foundations of Marx’s Philosophy and Economics’
• Gary North - ‘The Marx Nobody Knows’
• Hans-Hermann Hoppe - ‘Marxist and Austrian Class Analysis’
• Ralph Raico - ‘Classical-Liberal Roots of Marxist Class Conflict’
• Yuri Maltsev - ‘Inflation and the Bolsheviks’
• David Osterfeld - ‘Marx and Mercantilism’
• Robert LeFevre - ‘Origins of Socialist Thought’, ‘Communist Manifesto’
• Rothbard - ‘Emergence of Communism’
• Jeffrey Herbener - ‘The Utopianism of Marx and Keynes’
• Paul Gottfried - ‘Bolshevism and Democratic Socialism’