Corbyn is certainly left wing by US and UK standards, but has never been a Marxist, and is moderate by the standards of most of Europe. McDonnell on the other hand, could reasonably be described as Marxist.
He really was not. He was great at politics. He was great at taping into things that workers cared about.
But his actual economics that he laid out, in Das Kapital? The actual mathmatical equations in it, and falsifiable predictions in that book? The labor theory of value?
All pretty worthless. Basically no serious academic takes the labor theory of value seriously. It is non-sense.
Heterodox economic theories are heterodox for a reason. That reason being that they are not reflective of reality.
> He really was not. He was great at politics.
Not in the governance sense (he wasn't a statesmen), so you must mean in the other sense ("activities within an organization that are aimed at improving someone's status or position").
But this is sort of a difference without a difference, right? For most of human history, people who were "great at X" were in truth at least as good at politics as the thing they're actually known for.
Even e.g. Euclid was arguably a great geometer but an even greater politician.
Hell, Pythagoras was literally a cult leader.
With rare exceptions, your name isn't remembered by history unless you're good at politics.
> Basically no serious academic takes the labor theory of value seriously.
The labor theory of value is much older than Marx, and components of it are certainly taken seriously in management schools when talking about pricing services for example. Similarly, economists use components of other theories of value where it makes sense. I think it's more accurate to say that economics as a profession has moved on from these sorts of "generalizable theories of value" to give more nuanced analyses, which is quite different from saying that those theories proposed historically by Marx or Frisch or whoever have no influence.
Anyways, can you define "serious academic" in a way that doesn't make this sentence tautological? There's no one who claims Das Kapital is the Bible of Economics, but the same is true for Wealth of Nations and basically any other historical text. That doesn't mean that Smith and Marx are irrelevant, though.
That's because in many things in science and knowledge, being among the first to predict things wrong in an interesting manner is valuable.
He had some pretty sharp ideas about the problems in his contemporary economic system that are still relevant today, even if he dropped the ball on predicting the best solution.
