Marxist polemics against contemporary schools of thought

[promethean]

Are there any good contemporary Marxist polemics against other contemporary schools of thought?

In politics, the main opposing schools would be liberalism, conservatism, libertarianism.

In economics, they would be neo-classical and Austrian schools plus others.

Also any other Marxist polemics against other schools in any other field of study would be welcome.

[Zanthorus]

I'm not aware of any, although to be honest a critique of most of what you mentioned can be found in Marx himself. For example, liberalism relies on a dichotomy between 'public' and 'private' which manifests itself in the division between state and market. Marx critiques the division of human society into public and private spheres in his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right and On the Jewish Question. Libertarianism relies on the idea of freedom as the self-determination of the individual will, free from any outside constraints. Marx's polemic against this view can be found in the critique of Stirner in The German Ideology, or at the very least I do remember something about the difference between the idealist vision of freedom as self-determination of individuals and the materialist vision of freedom as control. Anyhow, Marx's theory of alienation or fetishism essentially debunks the idea that capitalism is marked by the realisation of individual freedom, since in a society of commodity producers the social relations between men work behind their backs and come to dominate them in the form of things. As the rule of things over man capitalism could be said to be the absolute negation of individual freedom.

Especially in the field of economics, the above is true. Marx's polemics against seeing the social relations of capitalism as natural instead of historically specific relations would apply to both neo-classical economics and especially Austrian economics (According to which school capitalism and human existence are essentially coterminous, since the categories of capitalism are innate categories of human action!). More specifically than that, the Austrian theory of profit as a reward for the capitalist giving up a certain amount of their time is essentially a jumped up version of Nassau Senior's theory of abstinence which was criticised by Marx. Marx's Theories of Surplus-Value and the notes on the historical evolution of political economy in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy are both highly relevant in this regard as Marx critiques the ideas of his predecessors and contemporaries within them, predecessors and contemporaries whose views don't fail to spring up again in economic apologetics for capitalism.

However, to actually partially answer your question, John Bellamy Foster's work Marx's Ecology is a debunking of various ideas in ecological thought which see the destruction of nature as occuring because of the rise of materialism in the 17th and 18th centuries in opposition to previous idealistic and vitalistic view of the natural world. He also goes into some depth about Marx's thoughts on environmental devastation and how this is engendered by capitalist society, which is useful with or without the critique of vitalism. Perhaps not entirely related to what you are asking but still probably relevant is Paul Mattick Jr's Social Knowledge: An Essay on the Nature and Limits of Social Science, which criticises various views which see scientific knowledge of society as impossible, and attempts to show that Marx's critique of political economy is a concrete example of a theory which gives just that. He also critiques various views which state that the current dissaray prevailing in sociology is a result of the infancy of the science, and attempts to demonstrate that the failure to produce a coherent methodology within social science is a result of the mystification inherent in commodity production, a mystification which can only be overcome by taking up a view point which views capitalism not as a natural state of society, but a historically specific mode of production which has the potential to fall as all previous modes of production have done, a viewpoint which is essentially socialist. The work is available online on libcom here (http://libcom.org/library/social-knowledge-essay-limits-social-science-paul-mattick-jr).

EDIT: Another one would be Geoffrey Pilling's The Crisis of Keynesian Economics, which critiques Keynesianism and Post-Keynesianism, and has a couple of stabs at theories like monetarism along the way. It's available on MIA here (http://www.marxists.org/archive/pilling/works/keynes/index.htm).

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

Just finished a review of Michael Harrington's "The Twilight of Capitalism," which will be posted on dailykos.com this coming Sunday at 6:00 pm EST. (They hold an anti-capitalist meetup).

Harrington does a nice job of taking on a variety of bourgeois economic schools (are there any other kind?), for their misreadings of Marx.
Warning: Harrington is a social-democrat, and his critique has a lot to do with his argument (which I find very cogent, BTW) that the Labor Theory of Value is not Marx's at all, that in fact Marx rejects it as an illusion of Ricardian thought.