Capital, commodity production and collapse (V): After collapse, what?
Part 5: Is Marxism today out of sync with history?
“Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed.” –Albert Einstein
In first place, the failure to recognize production based on exchange value has already collapsed implies Marxists are (or may be) looking for an event to occur in the future that has already happened in the past. In second place, it is effectively the same thing as stating Marx was wrong about the ultimate trajectory of capitalist production. At best, we have to explain why Marx’s predicted breakdown has not happened already; at worst, we might conclude Marx’s theory has been falsified by history.
This problem is further complicated when Marx’s theory is misread to predict something he clearly never predicted, “a collapse of capitalism”. If capitalism did not collapse as Marx said it would — and, obviously, it has not — it must follow his theory has been falsified by history. The problem with this conclusion, of course, is that Marx never actually predicted capitalism would collapse, he predicted production based on exchange value would collapse. In Marx’s theory, the collapse of production based on exchange value might very well lead to the end of capitalism as well, but it could just as easily lead to the state becoming the national capitalist, the direct exploiter of the working class.
If you think Marx predicted the collapse of capitalism, Marx is obviously wrong. This is bad for Marx, but no worse than hundreds of would-be prophets throughout history who have turned out to be wrong, including a considerable population waiting for Jesus to return. But if you think Marx predicted the breakdown of production based on exchange value, as I do, the implications are much worse for the working class today.
If Marx was right, Marxists today are completely out of sync with history.