Richard Kerschagl, Was kann Marx uns heute noch sagen? (1960)

Richard Kerschagl’s article in Schmollers Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft assesses Marx’s contemporary relevance through a sharply polemical examination of Capital. Its organizing move separates four capacities too often conflated: Marx as economic historian, forecaster, political programme-maker, and economic theorist. Kerschagl preserves a limited historical achievement while rejecting the theoretical system. The political importance of Marxism makes this distinction practically consequential, but political success cannot establish scientific validity.

Sicher ist aber, daß sein Werk, ebenso wie das von Robert Owen, als Darstellung der sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Verhältnisse etwa der Zeit von 1750 bis 1850 keineswegs wertlos ist.

English translation: It is certain, however, that his work, like that of Robert Owen, is by no means worthless as a depiction of the social and economic conditions of roughly the period from 1750 to 1850.

This concession defines the narrow positive answer to the title’s question. Despite selective evidence and partisan interpretation, Marx remains useful as a recorder and critic of social conditions. Kerschagl judges his forecasts much less favourably: unemployment, impoverishment, wages, and capital concentration have not developed as Marx predicted. Against concentration as a lasting tendency, he invokes the dispersal of family fortunes and the collapse of heterogeneous business groups. Political programmes require a different assessment altogether: as normative systems, they can be examined for consistency, but their implementation demonstrates power rather than truth.

The article’s main body proceeds from value and labour to prices, productive attribution, capital, credit, and money. Kerschagl presents these as interconnected failures originating in Marx’s labour theory of value. He reads embodied labour and socially necessary labour time as incompatible principles, associating the former with Ricardo and the latter with Carey’s reproduction-cost theory. Changing production conditions, he argues, undermine any conception of labour as a fixed substance of value.

Die von Marx selbst anerkannte Mittelhaftigkeit der Arbeit zur Erzeugung nützlicher Güter und die Behauptung Marxens von der Wertschöpfung durch die Arbeit, also der Arbeit als Ursache des Güterwertes, stehen in absolutem logischem Widerspruch.

English translation: The character of labour as a mere means for the production of useful goods, acknowledged by Marx himself, and Marx's assertion of the creation of value by labour, that is, of labour as the cause of the value of goods, stand in absolute logical contradiction.

The decisive alternative is purposive explanation: labour is expended because a good is considered useful, rather than usefulness or value arising simply from expenditure of labour. Kerschagl also challenges the reduction of skilled to simple labour. Without an independent measure, this reduction must depend on wages, making prices determine the supposedly prior values. Describing price as value expressed in money consequently supplies no explanation of price formation.

A second conceptual distinction separates Zurechnung, the attribution of productive contributions, from Zuteilung, the distribution of returns. Kerschagl contends that Marx’s hostility to capitalist income prevents him from acknowledging capital’s productive contribution. Yet recognizing that contribution need not entail granting the capitalist a corresponding income. On this reading, Marx allows a distributive demand to dictate economic explanation. Kerschagl develops the objection through extensive quotation from his own earlier writings: capital participates indispensably in production, while restricting productive attribution to manual labour makes coherent economic calculation impossible.

The discussion of capital leads into criticism of credit and monetary theory. Kerschagl finds Marx’s capital terminology unstable, moving between social groups, technical means, and economic categories. He rejects Bruno Fritsch’s reconstruction of a Marxian credit theory as interpolation of scattered remarks. His monetary criticism targets metallism: treating historically specific gold and silver arrangements as general laws allegedly prevents Marx from explaining paper currencies, bank money, and purchasing-power relations. Kerschagl contrasts Otto Bauer’s and Stalin’s departures from Marx with Benedikt Kautsky’s defence of the continuing metallic basis of money.

Über die Richtigkeit einer Theorie entscheiden weder ihre zeitlichen Erfolge noch ihre Durchsetzung als politische Postulate, sondern nur ihr echter Erklärungswert.

English translation: The correctness of a theory is decided neither by its temporal successes nor by its enforcement as political postulates, but only by its genuine explanatory value.

This methodological rule governs the conclusion. Kerschagl claims to test Marx through logic and epistemology rather than a competing political ideal. Nevertheless, the article’s repeated denunciations, biographical attacks, and appeals to marginal-utility reasoning reveal the adversarial standpoint of that claim. Its importance lies both in its substantive objections and in its insistence on separating historical description, normative commitment, and economic explanation.

Kerschagl finally interprets Marx’s contradictions as a source of ideological adaptability: conflicting passages enable divergent movements to claim his authority. Historical context and the unfinished publication of Capital offer partial mitigation, but do not change the verdict. Marx retains significance as a social critic and economic historian; Kerschagl denies that his economics provides a viable contemporary theory or warrants the designation “scientific socialism.”