Marxist crisis theory is enabled by statism not capitalism

in politics •  8 years ago  (edited)

Marx predicts an eventual crisis of capitalism where profits unexpectedly disappear due to new technology. Widespread gambling on unrealized profits by people who assume more liability than they can afford to lose is the situation that leads communist revolution. I argue that the root cause of this potential crisis is government interference with free trade, not free trade itself.

Marxist Crisis of Capitalism is only possible when technology unexpectedly eliminates profit margins in an environment where creditors attempt to violently recover unpaid loans. If enough debtors are simultaneously unable to repay loans, they may find it collectively rational to violently resist repossession. Because the state has a monopoly on violence, this resistance is directed towards the state which is overthrown.
The prediction that Marx makes requires an assumption that the state will pay repossession costs, or in the case of voluntarism, that the most cost efficient way to incentivize repayment is violence paid for by the debtor.
When violence is an incentive mechanism the system risks a scenario where agents collectively find the cost of resisting violence to be less than the collective cost of submitting.
Creditors start with possession of capital and when they loan it they incur opportunity cost plus risk the loan will not be repaid. However, because government subsidizes the cost of forcing repayment, this risk is transferred to the debtor. This involuntary value transfer has unintended consequences. It incentivizes debtors to organize a violent collective, and creditors to risk agreeing to otherwise unprofitable loans.
If a communist revolution is an inevitable result of statist capitalism, it is only because the ruling class uses threats to transfer the cost of unpaid loans from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat.
When capitalism is purely voluntary, creditors must pay the cost of incentivizing debtors to repay. While violence is still an option, in a voluntarist society the use of violence is not subsidized by the state and is far more expensive. Additionally, the risk of violence represents negative utility for the debtor that reduces the amount they are willing to pay for the loan. Without state interference, creditors will either assume the responsibility of assessing default risk and include it in the cost of a loan, or transfer the risk assessment to a third party by requiring the debtor purchase insurance. Creditors will seek competitive methods of cheaply increasing the incentive for debtors to repay. However, if the cost of repossession is low, the customer aversion to violence is low, the social acceptance of violence is high, the risk of debtor default is high, and the risk of widespread simultaneous default is low, debtors and creditors may both find it rational to participate in a system with violent incentives. I doubt it though because violence is expensive, unreliable, and undesirable compared to other means of achieving incentive compatibility in a voluntarist society. Furthermore, if human commerce in the future is largely facilitated by decentralized autonomous organizations, where users are globally distributed and not required to reveal their physical location, involuntary asset repossession and violent class warfare become implausible.

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