Market Elimination in Modern Capitalism: Where the Theorists were Right

Abstract

In previous chapters, we have shown how Marx, his followers, and subsequently economists and social theorists of other schools all predicted the decline of the market, and most did so from a broadly historical materialist perspective. They identified fundamental changes in the forces of production that would tend to eradicate market relations, including new technologies generating huge economies of scale and scope and the growing use of science — considered to be a public good that could not be easily or efficiently privately appropriated — as the basis of modern industry. At the level of the productive relations, they expected the market-dependent petite bourgeoisie to be replaced by a new professionalised middle class indifferent or actively hostile to the market, while the economic role of the state would grow for a variety of reasons and contribute to the increasing socialisation of production and consumption within the capitalist mode of production itself. This would be accompanied by changes to the superstructure, with legal doctrines, political institutions and ideology all adjusting to the basic transformation of society that was under way. In this chapter, we show how these expectations could be justified for much of the twentieth century, but were then obviously and comprehensively falsified by profound changes in the opposite direction. These changes were in accord with, and are best understood in terms of, the concepts and propositions of historical materialism, which we outlined in Chapters 1 and 2.