As a fairly big (philosophical) Marxist, it's important to recognize that Marx is much like the Bayesian Statistics of economics. For me personally, it was Mar

As a fairly big (philosophical) Marxist, it's important to recognize that Marx is much like the Bayesian Statistics of economics. For me personally, it was Marx that first made sense when I read it, very much like Bayesian statistics first made sense to me where I found Frequentist stats very confusing. That said it shares the same problem: If you learn Bayesian statistics the Summer before Stats 101 in college, it will likely hurt your performance in that class. Likewise, while Marx makes a lot of sense, understanding Marx will mean you have an even more difficult time communicating with mainstream/orthodox economists. However from a Marxist perspective this is no accident. One of, if not the most, important ideas coming out of Marx is the idea of ideology. The idea is that even our most basic thinking and views about the world are formed around the idea of maintaining existing social relations in favor of the ruling class. An example of this (my own) is the way that Christianity in Medieval Europe quickly evolved into a belief system where the natural order involves an all mighty ruler that must not be questioned. The idea that the natural order of things involves a strict monarchistic hierarchy was fundamental to the Medieval European world view. Clearly this is a beneficial world view if you are a ruling monarch. You still see the impact of this today in the way we tell stories about princesses who, even when their identity is either unknown or hidden, are innately superior to other around them, or in other narratives where justice is satisfied only when the "true king" sits on the throne. Orthodox economics, from a Marxist perspective, is referred to as bourgeois economics. That is, at a fundamental intellectual level, orthodox economics exists to reaffirm a capitalist worldview, in a similar way to medieval theology evolves to support monarchistic rule. An example of this is the way that the role of labor in the creation of value is fairly hidden, the economic inputs and outputs are all framed in a way to distract from the very idea that the worker creates value. Another good example of the difference is the "business cycle" vs Marx's crisis theory. In orthodox economics the business cycle is a borderline supernatural process that we just accept as "how things go". For Marx periodic market crises are because Capitialism is filled with unresolvable internal contradictions (one example is the incentive for Capitialist to maximize the exploitation of the worker while simultaneously depending on that worker for the creation of surplus value). Marx spends a good chunk of Capital vol III developing this idea. For Marx the big concern is that deep contradictions in the foundations in the logic of Capitialism will ultimately lead to it's collapse. So while I do recommend nearly everyone read Marx, it will likely hurt, not help, you understand mainstream economic theories.