When I say bourgeois economists misrepresent Marx it is not an exaggeration. I read a bit of economics. I am pretty well versed in Keynes, Smith AND Marx. Whoever wrote this textbook however clearly is not. It starts in the bold, Marx NEVER argued that the government should own the means of production. Marx didn’t care about the government. He argued SOLELY that the workers should own and democratically manage the means of production. And that’s out of the incredibly small amount of writing Marx devoted to this subject. Marx wrote about capitalism. If you could condense everything Marx ever wrote into some 50 volumes, his writing on future communist and socialist society and socialist government would amount to no more than 6 pages. Secondly Das Capital is ONLY about how capitalism works, it’s extremely lengthy and detailed about the functions of the capitalist system. No where in it does he formulate the foundations for a “socialist government”. The same is true for the Communist Manifesto. It’s solely about the history of class struggle, human history, and communism as an economic solution to the contradictions of class society. NO WHERE does he “lay the foundations for a communist state” (which is itself an oxymoron). And absolutely nowhere does he EVER argue that the government would be the “master of economic outcomes”. Socialism has absolutely nothing to do with government, it is an economic system. I cannot emphasize this enough, socialism is when the workers collectively own the enterprises they work for and democratically elect representatives and democratically control industry. The system this book describes is STILL private ownership of the means of production (capitalism), it is simply run more efficiently by the state. We call this state-capitalism. The USSR utilized this system as a PREREQUISITE to socialism until Stalin “declared” the Soviet Union to have achieved socialism despite ample evidence that it didn’t. This is a gross and intentional misrepresentation of Marxian economics to sway curious students away from a Marxist conclusion. This is educational and literary heresy!
I intend on further elaborating later on this issue and updating this article.