The Massive Volumes of Marx's "Capital" Have Become a Quasi-Magic Touchstone, a Source of Assurance that Somewhere and Somehow a Genius "Proved" Capitalism to be Wrong and Doomed

Despite the massive intellectual feat that Marx's Capital  represents, the Marxian contribution to economics can be readily summarized as virtually zero. Professional economics as it exists today reflects no indication that Karl Marx  ever existed. This neither denies nor denigrates Capital as  an intellectual achievement, and perhaps in its way the  culmination of classical economics. But the development of  modern economics has simply ignored Marx. Even economists who are Marxists typically utilize a set of analytical  tools to which Marx contributed nothing, and have   recourse to Marx only for ideological, political, or historical  purposes.

In professional economics, Capital was a detour into a  blind alley, however historic it may be as the centerpiece of a worldwide political movement. What is said and done in  its name is said and done largely by people who have never read through it, much less followed its labyrinthine reasoning from its arbitrary postulates to its empirically false conclusions. Instead, the massive volumes of Capital have become a quasi-magic touchstone—a source of assurance  that somewhere and somehow a genius "proved" capitalism  to be wrong and doomed, even if the specifics of this proof are unknown to those who take their certitude from it.

--Thomas Sowell, Marxism: Philosophy and Economics (New York: Quill William Morrow, 1985), 220-221.