That post about some neoliberal momo not understanding what Marx said about value got me remembering something back from my undergrad econ program. One of my primary professors was a true libertarian. And the way he viewed Marx was... something.
On one hand, he of course tried to shit on Marxism. I remember in one of the first classes of Macro 101, he brought out the "labor theory of value is wrong because mud pies don't have value" line (this is something Marx specifically addresses and debunks within the first few pages of chapter 1 of Capital). He would unironically say "the problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other peoples' money". He praised Pinochet for being an "economic miracle worker" and said that high unemployment at the time in Europe was due to "socialist policy".
Yet at the same time, he also had this weird admiration for Marx and Capital specifically. I don't think he ever read it or even bothered to understand it. But he did see Capital as the logical conclusion of 19th century political economy - an unbroken line from Adam Smith to Marx. Despite being a libertarian and someone who did read philosophy, he just thought that Smith, Ricardo, Marx et al were wrong to focus on "value", and it's origins in labor. So while he admired Smith as the guy who put down on paper a lot of the first ideas of how an economy works, he ultimately saw him as "wrong". And Marx just inadvertently showed how silly it is to come up with theories of value. According to this professor, Marx "killed" political economy. Marx was somehow "wrong" and also a giant of political economy.
I remember he squared all this by thinking it was the marginalists/Austrians who got it right by focusing on supply and demand. That the forces that push supply and demand are all that matter, and that we only need to understand what drives prices because prices are the very way that the gods of capitalism speak to us. Since price movements are all that matter, he thought economists should focus on what are the "rules" that drive human behavior because behavior drives prices. And this is why (according to him) he was a libertarian: it was guys like Friedman and Hayek who truly understood hUmAn NaTuRe. Humans are always self-interested, we seek to maximize utility, etc. Start from those first principles and you can figure out your economy.
So it was eye-opening to me when I actually read Capital, how it showed how someone I looked up to really didn't have a clue about what he was talking about. Marx DID bring political economy to its logical conclusion, it's just that the capitalists didn't like the conclusion he arrived at. So instead, they do what my old econ prof did: don't bother learning what Marx said, just shit on it with pithy quips and just say SoCiALisM dOeSn'T wOrK. No one will challenge you because no one reads Marx. Because as people like Hilferding and Bukharin showed many decades ago, the economists who think they can actually take on Marx and defeat him only end up embarrassing themselves (not to mention how Marx knew what he detractors would say and specifically addressed their points in Capital). But if you never engage with Marx in the first place....
(fwiw he also shit on Keynes who I do think had some correct ideas. IIRC he thought Keynesianism worked for a couple decades during and after WW2 because reasons but that the last few decades showed that monetarism and libertarian economics is the one true gospel. This was before the GFC in 2008/09 of course...)
I mean, if we’re being real here at day 1 Zionism had the support of many non-opportunist communists too, Stalin being the one who comes to mind. Not his best moment.