Experience shows that Marx’s prophecies were false. But experience can always be explained away. And, indeed, Marx himself, and Engels, began with the elaboration of an auxiliary hypothesis designed to explain why the law of increasing misery does not work as they expected it to do. According to this hypothesis, the tendency towards a falling rate of profit, and with it, increasing misery, is counteracted by the effects of colonial exploitation, or, as it is usually called, by ‘modern imperialism’.
