Labor Theory of Value

Critics substituting their own idealistic conceptions of value. Marx is really clear about how his theory of value differs from all prior theories: the recognition of the dual character of commodities as both use-value and value

Historical Materialism

is no more deterministic than Darwinian evolution is deterministic. The constellation of different life forms proves that evolution is not deterministic, however you can still understand a lot through the recognition of the material constraint imposed on life, namely survival in a given environment. Analyzing biological evolution from the abstract perspective of survival and statistics is not an oversimplification; it correctly identifies the essential law governing evolution regardless of the particular form it takes, e.g., the particular species being considered.

In the same way that Darwin's theory does not predict future evolution of species, neither does Marx's theory predict future evolution of society. It is a way to understand past developments and how to influence future developments, but it does not reduce to a mere formula or procedure.

When Marx says that communism is inevitable, it is so, given that capitalism develops according to its own intrinsic laws and contradictions. It is trivially true that an asteroid or a zombie apocalypse could send us back to the stone age to halt this process.

Capitalism is the final form of class society because in capitalism all personal, direct forms of exploitation have fully detached into the impersonal, abstract form of capital. There can be no revolution against a class of individual persons because individuals only represent the underlying economic relation of capital. This is why Marx and Engels thought that anti-capitalist revolution must necessarily oppose itself to exploitation as such.

Dialectical Materialism

Not much to say on this except that most critics (and many Marxists) have a shit understanding of dialectical materialism.

Centralized Planning

Critics not understanding that the only difference in central planning, as regarding capitalism and communism, is that the former does not recognize production to be social while the latter does. The moment a division of labor occurs in society, production is social. The question is whether property relations keep up.

Capitalism, through its tendency to centralize capital into an ever shrinking number of firms, by itself centralizes planning. This is one of the most revolutionary points of Capital: that this tendency of centralization lays the groundwork for a communist revolution, since the transition becomes more obvious and easy when only a handful of large conglomerates would need to be seized. The transition would be almost purely formal, a matter of changing ownership, rather than requiring any change to the material conditions of production.

"Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation."

Alienation and Exploitation

Critics arguing that "ackshually the workers like it!1!" isn't real criticism, just apologia.