Marxist Apologist (Later for Nazism) Werner Sombart Admits that the Marxian Law of Value Is False If It Claims To Be in Harmony with Actual Experience

An apologist of Marx, as intelligent as he is ardent, has lately appeared in the person of Werner Sombart. His apology, however, shows one peculiar feature. In order to be able to defend Marx's doctrines he has first to put a new interpretation upon them.

Let us go at once to the main point. Sombart admits (and even adds some very subtle arguments to the proof) that the Marxian law of value is false if it claims to be in harmony with actual experience. He says (p. 573) of the Marxian law of value that it “is not exhibited in the exchange relation of capitalistically produced commodities,” that it “does not by any means indicate the point towards which market prices gravitate,” that “just as little does it act as a factor of distribution in the division of the yearly social product,” and that “it never comes into evidence anywhere” (p. 577). The “outlawed value” has only “one place of refuge left—the thought of the theoretical economist. . . . If we want to sum up the characteristics of Marx's value, we would say, his value is a fact not of experience but of thought” (p. 574).

--Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Karl Marx and the Close of His System, ed. Paul M. Sweezy (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1949), 102.

Werner Sombart Wishes to Trace Back the Opposition Between the Marxian System and the Austrian School System to a Dispute About Method

This leads me to a last point on which I must touch in regard to Sombart. Sombart wishes to trace back the opposition which exists between the Marxian system on the one side, and the adverse theoretic systems—especially of the so-called Austrian economists—on the other, to a dispute about method. Marx, he says, represents an extreme objectivity. We others represent a subjectivity which runs into psychology. Marx does not trace out the motives which determine individual subjects as economic agents in their mode of action, but he seeks the objective factors, the "economic conditions," which are independent of the will, and, I may add, often also of the knowledge, of the individual. He seeks to discover "what goes on beyond the control of the individual by the power of relations which are independent of him." We, on the contrary, " try to explain the processes of economic life in the last resort by a reference to the mind of the economic subject," and "plant the laws of economic life on a psychological basis."

--Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Karl Marx and the Close of His System: A Criticism, trans. Alice M. Macdonald (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898), 211-212.

Marx Has Not Proved His Fundamental Proposition That Labour Alone Governs Exchange Relations Either Objectively Or Subjectively

Thirdly—and this concerns the criticism of Marx in particular—I must ask with all plainness that if any use is made of the objective method it should be the right use. If external objective connections are shown to exist, which, like fate, control action with or without the knowledge, with or without the will of the doer, let them be shown to exist in their correctness. And Marx has not done this. He has not proved his fundamental proposition that labour alone governs exchange relations either objectively, from the external, tangible, objective world of facts, with which on the contrary they are in opposition, or subjectively, from the motives of the exchanging parties ; but he gives it to the world in the form of an abortive dialectic, more arbitrary and untrue to facts than has probably ever before been known in the history of our science.

--Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Karl Marx and the Close of His System: A Criticism, trans. Alice M. Macdonald (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898), 216.