Does he matter?

...Karl Marx: a Nineteenth-Century Life by Jonathan Sperber – review

Its bible, of course, was Das Kapital – although few cadres actually bothered to read it. And Sperber again shows the relative anachronism of Marx's thinking by the 1870s. At its core was not an epic crisis of capitalism (there had been too many false dawns for that), but the question that David Ricardo and Adam Smith had been wrestling with since the late 1700s: the falling rate of profit. Marx tried desperately if vainly to offer an answer, but meanwhile the world was changing around him: industrial processes were reframing rates of surplus value; colonial markets were transforming the metropole's economics; the mid-Victorian boom meant a growing middle class; a new service sector was emerging ("from the whore to the Pope, there is a mass of such scum"); and marginal utility theory was stressing the market interaction of consumer preferences. Yet Marx was still wrestling with James Mill and Thomas Malthus.