Schrödinger’s Capital: How Marxists erased Marx’s prediction of capitalist collapse
NOTE 26: The contradiction between the two rules within the capitalist mode of production
In my last post, I discussed the odd coincidence between quantum theory and economics. The coincidence is that, in both disciplines, the respective processes appear to be determined by two different sets of rules.
In economics these two different sets of rules are given expression in the division of economics into what is today known as macroeconomic and microeconomic theory. Behaviors at the level of the firm are determined by the rules of microeconomic theory, while behavior of the economy as a whole is determined by the rules of macroeconomic theory.
I argued that this division occurred because bourgeois economics takes as it starting point not production of commodities, but the consumption choices of agents on the margin. Neoclassical theory thus overlooks the fact that the act of production is also a form of consumption.
There is another feature of this split of bourgeois economics into separate microeconomic and macroeconomic rules that may not be obvious at first: both sets of rules are valid and reflect a real contradiction within the capitalist mode of production.