Thoughts on Capital and Science
About halfway through volume I of Marx’s Capital, I can understand why this book has been so revolutionary. In this book, Marx is not setting out his vision of a new economic system. He is not outlining his vision of communism. He is laying out a devastating critique of Adam Smith’s theory of perfectly functioning markets in producing goods. Unfortunately Marx’s theories have widely been declared irrelevant for a number of reasons, particularly as part of an ideological war against the USSR and its subsequent collapse, and a declaration that Marx’s theories are not scientific.
On the first aspect — the collapse of the USSR has an impact on Marx’s theory of socialism, although this is a complex debate. Marx declared himself not a Marxist because so many people attributed things to Marxism as a movement that had little to do with Marx’s theories. But whatever the specifics of the debate about communism are, this does not refute Marx’s critique of capitalism. In Capital he shows how the internal contradictions of the capitalist system mean there will always be crises, and these contradictions must be resolved through exploitation. (Whether his proposed solutions for a new mode of production is correct is for a different debate.)
Marx’s ideas have been declared unscientific by modern philosophers and economists and the effect of this was of great importance. After scientists like Karl Popper declared that science must be falsifiable to be called science, there was a battle over what is considered proper science. Popper’s ideas became generally accepted among elites in capitalist countries, and perhaps conveniently, this meant that capitalist economists have simply been able to say that Marxism isn’t falsifiable, so is not science (Popper, 2002, p.49), and as such, they say Marx is irrelevant and they can ignore his ideas completely. There are two problems here, one being the assumption that social and political science can be studied in the same way that physics is, the other that mainstream economists use this as a convenient excuse to ignore opinions they don’t like. Social and political science is not like physics, where there are clear laws and connections between cause and effect. Falsifiability may work in physics, where there are clear logical connections between cause and effect, but not in social science. We can prove that the sun does not travel around the Earth, so it is falsifiable, but people are complex, and structured societies of millions of people are even more so. The only way we ever predict people’s behaviours is in artificially constructed lab tests or very specific ways. For example, we could predict whether millions of people will buy product X instead of product Y, but we cannot ever accurately predict how millions of people will act across our all areas of society… the surprise votes for Brexit, Corbyn and Trump are reminders of this. But the idea that people’s behaviour *is* like physics — predictable, logical, and falsifiable — is how mainstream economists have got away with saying Marx is irrelevant. Nowadays, economists draw boxes around behaviour, saying that economics is the study of rational behaviour and social science studies irrational behaviour. But this simply says that people’s purchases and sales in this artificial construction of capitalism are predictable — but of course they are. Society has been structured around regular working days and limited meaningless choices of goods. The prediction of sales and purchases in our capitalist economy is the artificial lab environment within which it is possible to predict behaviours. If we could really predict people’s behaviour, we could predict a great deal more than than their choices in the supermarket.
The technique that Marx uses in Capital is dialectics, and this is used to show how in society objects can have opposing roles. It is through analysing these opposing roles that Marx shows how capitalism is contradictory and crisis-prone. For example, Adam Smith’s idea is that in a perfectly functioning market, money simply acts as a means of exchange; it is just an intermediary between two different parties, a buyer and a seller, who are exchanging their goods. However, Marx shows how one who hoards money ends up having social power over others. One who has lots of money has more power than one who has a lot of goods, for example, a wood carver may have a large stock of hand-made chairs. Chairs are difficult to exchange for other things, whereas money is easily exchanged for anything you desire. So here is the tension — not only is money acting as a means of exchange, it is also grants power to those who hoard it. But if too many people hoard it the economy stops circulating, and if the economy stops there is a crisis. This is only one of many contradictions in capitalism that Marx identifies. Treating economics like a hard science would assume money is simply money performing a simple logical role. Indeed this is what money appears to be doing in day-to-day life. However, this logical role is simply the surface level appearance. Marx is damning of other political economists for taking things as they appear without thorough investigation. He says “scientific analysis… is possible only if we can grasp the inner nature,” (Marx, 1976, p.433) likening the way a poor astronomer may simply accept the sun orbits the Earth simply because it appears to do so. Accepting things at face value, as mainstream economists do, is the unsound and unscientific method, and Marx’s method is far more rigorous.
Mainstream economists continue to act like Capital had never been written, and believe the perfectly functioning market is still possible. Not only is the idea of a perfect market wrong, it is nonsense theory that has thoroughly been discredited over one hundred years ago. Mainstream economists cannot successfully argue that Marx is wrong — it is only by declaring Marx’s critique as not-science and irrelevant that mainstream economists can continue to believe in the perfectly functioning market. The capitalist economy is collapsing under the weight of environmental destruction, inequality, and exploitation, just as Marx said it would. There are no limitations built into capitalism, only the necessity for constant growth. Although it is sometimes a trudge, most of the time Marx’s Capital is a fascinating and interesting story of the weird dynamics of this economic system in producing goods. I think that no book is more relevant to where we are now, and should be read by anyone who is having doubts about where the world is going.
Marx, Karl (1976). Capital: Volume I. Penguin.
Popper, Karl (2002). Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. Routledge.
