Despite the considerable merit of these books, none of them solves the puzzle of Marx’s career. Why didn’t he push his analysis of capitalism to the stage where he could identify the mechanism by which it would break down? We can only speculate. One possible explanation is that in the drafts that became Capital Volume 3 Marx has to face up to an issue that threatens the foundations of his economic analysis: the “transformation problem”. Briefly, if all profit comes from the exploitation of labour then highly labour-intensive industries should be more profitable than those that use little labour. But they are not. Marx allows “values” to deviate from “prices” to address this problem, but most commentators think his maths was awry, and in any case once prices no longer directly reflect labour input, much of the intuitive appeal of Marx’s economics drains away. Doing better remains a serious technical question in Marxist economics; it may be that Marx knew his own solution was half-baked, but couldn’t see how to do better. In any case he seemed to lose confidence and heart in something. Yet his published writings show no signs of any such doubt, and it is this self-confidence, together with the depth of his analysis, that even today make him such an intoxicating read.
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