Boehm-Bawerk, Eugen

Boehm-Bawerk, Eugen 

(also Böhm-Bawerk). Born Feb. 12, 1851, in Brno; died Aug. 27, 1914, in Vienna. Austrian economist, representative of the Austrian school, professor in Innsbruck and Vienna.

For a long time Boehm-Bawerk occupied the post of finance minister of Austria, and he was president of the Academy of Sciences of Austria. In his works Fundamentals of the Theory of the Value of Commodity Value (1886; Russian translation, 1903), Capital and Interest (1884–89; Russian translation, vol. 1,1909), and Karl Marx and the Close of His System (1896; Russian translation, 1897: Teoriia Karla Marksa i ee kritika), Boehm-Bawerk tried to refute the Marxist theory of the value of labor and surplus value. He propounded the subjective-psychological theory of marginal utility and profits. Profit, according to Boehm-Bawerk, is a permanent category, whose basis of motivation is not economic but psychological—the difference between subjective estimates of present and future wealth. Modern bourgeois economists use the views of Boehm-Bawerk in their struggle against Marxist political economy.

REFERENCES

Marx, K. Kapital, vol. 1 of K. Marx and F. Engels. Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 23, ch. 1.
Lenin, V. I. “Nekriticheskaia kritika.” Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 3.
Lenin, V. I. “Retsenziia na knigu Karl Kautsky: Bernstein und das sozial-demokratische Programm, Eine Antikritik.” Ibid., vol. 4.
Lenin, V. I. Marksizm i revizionizm. Ibid., vol. 17.