I know someone who, even though they didn’t read Capital, read a lot about it through summaries and that sort of thing. They didn’t actually disagree with anything per se and thought Marx was incredibly insightful, but they just felt Marx’s analysis wasn’t relevant anymore because something about how “capitalism has proven in the last 150 years to make everyone around the world better off”.

I tried to explain that no, lots of people in the Global South in particular are not better off, how nearly all the improvement in living standards in poor countries since the mid 20th century has mostly been contained just China, and how since Marx’s time a lot of the super-exploitation has occurred within imperial core countries was just exported to the periphery. But like so many American libs, this person just sorta handwaved all that away as unimportant. I mean, of course capitalism does have an incredible ability to create capital and increase commodity production. It can improve the lives of certain strata of society and even the working class IF workers exert their class power politically; but the idea that capitalism just makes the lives of everyone better ad infinitum is not accurate.

There were people ~100 years ago like Bohm-Bawerk who I do believe read Capital with the idea to critique it. But the thing with Marx is, if you go in trying to “disprove” him you’re going to miss a lot of the important stuff and get a lot wrong. Bohm-Bawerk, who I do believe was very smart and did understand a lot of it, still got a lot wrong and Marxists like Hilferding and Bukharin dunked on him pretty resoundingly (and Andrew Kliman did too, recently). But nowadays no, the anti-Marxists greatest warrior is probably James Lindsay and that guy clearly hasn’t read any of Marx. At best he’s quote-mined the Manifesto.