The file contains a 1933 single-author polemical monograph in economics and political theory. Kerschagl frames it as a scholarly refutation of Marxism based on Marx’s own doctrines, moving through three parts: value/price/money/exchange; socialist economic calculation; and ideology, including class struggle, liberalism, utopian socialism, and communism. Its thesis is that Marxism is not only practically dangerous but theoretically self-contradictory: economic science, logic, and ordinary reason must converge against it.
Denn wirkliche Wissenschaft soll, darf und kann nicht mit dem gesunden Menschenverstand, oder, wenn wir so sagen wollen, mit der Logik, in Widerspruch stehen.
English translation: For genuine science should not, may not, and cannot stand in contradiction to common sense — or, if we prefer, to logic.
The first part begins from the premise that Marxism stands or falls with value theory. Kerschagl treats Marx’s vocabulary—value, use-value, exchange-value, labor, socially necessary labor time—as unstable rather than dialectically subtle. His central conceptual move is to reverse Marx’s causal order: labor does not create value; labor is undertaken because a purposively valued good is sought.
Die Grundlage des Marxschen Systems ist seine Werttheorie.
English translation: The foundation of the Marxian system is his theory of value.
Labor-value theory is therefore attacked as a cost theory that suppresses utility, quality, scarcity, and quantity. Socially necessary labor time becomes, in Kerschagl’s reading, a fiction unable to compare heterogeneous labor, explain revaluation after technical change, or account for demand. The critique then extends to exchange and price: if Marx begins by assuming equal labor-substances exchanged, he cannot explain actual market ratios. The money chapter completes the indictment by presenting Marx as a crude metallist who derives money’s value from gold’s labor-cost and therefore misses credit, signs, fiduciary media, and purchasing power.
Geldschöpfung, Angebot und Nachfrage, Marktprobleme existieren für Marx überhaupt nicht.
English translation: Money creation, supply and demand, market problems simply do not exist for Marx.
The second part asks how a Marxist economy could calculate. Kerschagl’s relevance to interwar economic debates lies in the claim that abolishing private property does not abolish the need to compare means and ends. Profitability, capital maintenance, depreciation, wage comparison, and enterprise selection remain real problems in any economy. A planned order must still know which processes waste labor and capital, yet Marxism, he argues, has destroyed the measures by which this could be known.
Marx nimmt nur einen Produktionsfaktor an und zerstört damit die Grundlage jeder vernünftigen Wirtschaftsrechnung.
English translation: Marx assumes only one factor of production and thereby destroys the basis of any rational economic calculation.
Here Kerschagl’s key distinction is between imputation and distribution. Political theory may ask who should receive income, but economic calculation must first ask which factors contributed to output. By recognizing only labor, especially manual labor, Marxism denies capital’s productive role in order to deny the capitalist’s moral claim. The result, Kerschagl argues, is technical blindness: no coherent account of interest, capital renewal, machinery, managerial labor, entrepreneurial judgment, or modern firms in which ownership and control are separated.
The third part widens the attack into ideology. Class struggle is portrayed as Marxism’s organizing myth: it creates an antagonistic counter-society through unions, cooperatives, schools, clubs, housing, courts, and press, while making right subordinate to power and class prior to nation, religion, and state.
Die Lehre vom Klassenkampf muß mit Naturnotwendigkeit zur Zerstörung jedes Volkes führen.
English translation: The doctrine of class struggle must, with the necessity of a law of nature, lead to the destruction of every people.
The chapters on liberalism and utopian socialism clarify Kerschagl’s intellectual map. Marxism is not liberalism’s simple opposite but its radical heir: he links it to Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Darwinism, atomistic individualism, egoism, and the reduction of quality to quantity. Against Marxism, he gives qualified praise to Owen, Fourier, and Saint-Simon for cooperation, experiment, religious feeling, and concern with human happiness, even while judging their projects impractical. Utopian socialism has moral ends without a reliable path; Marxism has a path of struggle without a humane end.
The final chapter collapses the difference between socialist and communist Marxism into tactics. Evolution versus revolution, democracy versus dictatorship, compensation versus confiscation, and religious neutrality versus hostility are treated as differences of method, not principle. The work’s significance lies in its fusion of economic-calculation critique with interwar anti-Marxism. Its repeated pattern is clear: wherever Marxism claims to abolish exploitation by abolishing markets, property, or classes, Kerschagl argues that it abolishes the conceptual instruments needed to understand economy and social order.
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