Essay:Marxism: Philosophy and Ignorance

“Marx’s original arbitrary postulate [was] that labor was the source of wealth, and therefore of all non-labor income” — Thomas Sowell, Marxism: Philosophy and Economics, Chapter 7 Marxian Value “Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power. The above phrase is to be found in all children's primers and is correct insofar as it is implied that labor is performed with the appurtenant subjects and instruments. But a socialist program cannot allow such bourgeois phrases to pass over in silence the conditions that lone give them meaning. And insofar as man from the beginning behaves toward nature, the primary source of all instruments and subjects of labor, as an owner, treats her as belonging to him, his labor becomes the source of use values, therefore also of wealth. The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labor; since precisely from the fact that labor depends on nature it follows that the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission” — Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme

The reputed backbone of Thomas Sowell’s analysis of Marxism is his own supposed shift from the method of analysis towards a capitalist framework—called upon to establish credibility as an “ex-ideologue.” Thomas Sowell’s biographer, Jason L. Riley, writes, for instance, “Sowell would self-identify as a Marxist throughout his twenties. His senior thesis at Harvard was on Marxian economics, and his master’s thesis at Columbia was on Marxian business cycle theory. Even his first scholarly publication, in the March 1960 issue of American Economic Review, was on the writings of Karl Marx. But like many others who are attracted to Marxist philosophy in their youth, Sowell would abandon it as he became older and more experienced." His AER article, which Riley describes vaguely as “on the writings of Karl Marx”,—evoking an idea of continued adherence to Marxism with the “but like many others…” platitude following afterwards—was in actuality a polemic against Marx’s conceptions and predictions regarding alienation where Sowell repeatedly speaks of (latter-day) Marxists from the stance of persona non grata (this work was addressed by the Marxist Roland Meek two years later). Peculiarly, and I will concede this is somewhat pedantic, the Reason Magazine reprint of this excerpt contains the additional subheading: “It wasn’t until his thirties that the economist started to turn from Marxism”, with the publisher of Sowell’s biography signing off on this. Given that Sowell’s article was published in the March 1960 issue of AER, and that he was born on June 30, 1930, Thomas Sowell would have been twenty-nine years old at the time of its publication; the RM subheading is incorrect, likely to simplify the question to an even number and render the timeline comprehensible to whatever brainrotten children read “Reason Magazine.” The proof of Sowell’s Marxist history is shaky at best and might be mostly ignored if not for his own assertions clearly only meant as a self-assurance to conservatives that Marxists are merely naive children, mirroring the stories of Jordan Peterson and the like of “breaking from Marxism/socialism.”