Unpopular Opinion

I don't think this is particularly unpopular outside of Lemmy, but still.

I consider myself a leftist primarily because:

• I want every individual to have maximum possible freedom as long as its existence doesn't reduce the summation of the freedom of all individuals.
• The current system doesn't do a good enough job at this as it permits power concentration.
• The policies I believe would help achieve my "want" (the freedom thing) are generally considered "leftist".

Marx for his time, did some quite cool stuff. I really enjoyed his work in sociology. His critique of capitalism had merit.

THAT BEING SAID, labor theory of value is absolute dogshit. FOR THE TIME, sure, ok- nice effort. But TODAY, when marginalism has proven time and time again to be the more superior explanation to value, defending LTV is kinda lame.

I've never met a single professional economist who takes it seriously. Most of its defenders (in my experience) tend to be folks who have no economics background, and frankly aren't willing to have a good faith convo. I'm not trying to bandwagon effect + appeal to authority here, but this is just so reminiscent of anti vaxxers and flat earthers (at least for me).

I won't go into MY reasoning for preferring marginalist economics over LTV economics as there are much much better writeups for this than what I'm capable of. Here's one I could lazily find.

But yeah. In conclusion, I'm of the opinion that it would be much nicer if leftists got rid of Marx from their economics, and instead adopted economic models that better described reality.