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(Thread IKs: dead gay comedy forums)
 
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FirstnameLastname
Jul 10, 2022
Probation
Can't post for 18 hours!

BillsPhoenix posted:

Tendency of Rate of Profit to fall.

My #1 critique is the failure to address racism and sexism. This is a major issue for nearly all economic theories, but problematic for TRPF. Exploitation of surplus labor is a mandatory building block for TRPF.

Holding everything else constant, the civil rights movement should have caused a significant decline in profit - as wages were increased for black and minority Americans. The movement aligns with a fall in profit. This is consistent with the Marxs formula, but complicated the usage of the time period as proof of trpf.

wages, growth, and profit arent the same thing
ocal relative change isn't universal absolute change

if profit is growing massively due to worldwide industrial development, wages can temporarily have a relative increase without reducing profit

wage and profit in one industry can also be offset by another, this is one of the biggest issues with capitalism being used as a metric for real world productivity, according to capitalism a crypto farm has as much utility as a real farm that generates an equivalent profit, and the crypto farm is PREFERABLE if it's distributing that profit amongst fewer people

costs can be offset over time and across different markets, what appears from close up to be a raise to the black american worker can actually be internally seen as a 20, 40 year loan by capital
they can reduce compensation or increase costs later to recoup it so that ultimately the total share of labor compensation doesn't grow relative to total profit, only to earlier relative compensation and only within a limited timespan

all of capitalism is interconnected you can't divide it geographically or chronologically, it's a series of self-interfering butterfly effect-y ripples within one thing - a good example of how absolute this is within capitalism is that haiti is still suffering direct financial consequences of the Haitian revolution in the 1700s, while neighboring cuba left the capitalist system and as a result isn't suffering in the same way, while haiti will continue to suffer until another location upsets capitalism more and is relegated to the low spot and then Haiti can begin to prosper once someone else is becoming most exploited and victimized

black people in the 60s were displaced from the lowest point on the american totem pole by leftists and southeast asians except within the american south, and so the rest of the country took issue with that bc they wanted white and black southerners focused on the same enemy they were, not from any sort of moral or ethical development amongst the empowered parts of society under capitalism, those don't happen

the reason it won't change otherwise for haiti within capital are ultimately the same ideological principles that make capitalism exist and what makes tmrpf correct: capitalism is about competition, can't win unless someone loses and if you're currently winning you have to keep the losers losing.
it's dangerous to even try to change that because the system is entirely built on established hierarchy and the strength of hierarchy is from the localized advantage in power structures it allows, by also controlling the contextual structures the power is drawn from and given to. as the top of the capitalist hierarchy solidifies and strengthens its grip on power within its system, those individual structures it gains strength from crystallize over time and becomes very brittle because profit incentives hollow out institutions made to maintain the status quo once it's become established - no more profit to be found - all of the surplus power is vacuumed upwards in the hierarchy to strengthen it and weaken competition


in a competition with no set timespan or end condition, without endless physical boundary or resources and growing overall population, given enough time the winners will have nothing they can take from the other side except their lives, at which point they'll either do that and split internally into a new set of winners and losers, rebirthing the cycle of capitalism and setting it off towards the same end
-or- the winners will be destroyed by people who aren't trying to be competitive and the cycle of competition ends

there's no other outcome, growth thru population, industry, geography all only delay it as long as the growth can occur, nothing else does anything in the long run, tmrpf is correct anywhere you look at trends across the entire system and only appears otherwise if you limit the scope

FirstnameLastname has issued a correction as of 23:02 on Feb 6, 2024

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BillsPhoenix
Jun 29, 2023
But what if Russia aren't the bad guys? I'm just asking questions...
I'll let a MIC goon respomd to the services are productive labor comment.

For my positions - I am fully a believer in the theory of exploitation of wages or surplus wages, surplus value. I'll caveat the US doesn't teach it this way, but it's my belief and in line with Marx.

TRPF is a good theory. I think it's one of many factors at a macro level. I don't think it's the only factor, nor do I believe it must result in a collapse. This is where I differ with Marx, and I don't belie e a lot of theories and claims that build off "inevitable collapse".


But... I'm western educated and have appreciated the engagement and dispelling of ridiculous things I've been taught so I'm poking at stuff where I can.

BillsPhoenix
Jun 29, 2023
But what if Russia aren't the bad guys? I'm just asking questions...

dead gay comedy forums posted:

Please elaborate because this is literally the first time I've ever seen anyone raise that idea ever and I am very much curious to see the why

Which part? The civil rights movement causing an increase in wages? This is a core part of modern minimum wage arguments and inequality.

Fat-Lip-Sum-41.mp3
Nov 15, 2003

BillsPhoenix posted:

I'll let a MIC goon respomd to the services are productive labor comment.

I don't know what you think you mean by that. A use value is anything that satisfies a need or want. The social relations of production are dispositive, not some third party assessment of the utility of what is wanted (the satisfaction of the want is the utility). You are using a definition of the word "productive" that is totally outside of the relevant domain, which is Classical Economics.

You need to understand the terminology. You're not going to find that outside of the books.

BillsPhoenix
Jun 29, 2023
But what if Russia aren't the bad guys? I'm just asking questions...

FirstnameLastname posted:

wages, growth, and profit arent the same thing

An issue with studying Marx in the modern era is terms he used have been now used for other items. He did also use some terms interchangeably with different meaning.

Growth is one I know - he uses it as Growth if economy to describe the feudal to capitalist to communist society change.

He also uses Growth to describe the acquisition of wealth/capital by capital owners in a capitalist society, helping them further entrench themselves about the laborers.

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


BillsPhoenix posted:

Which part? The civil rights movement causing an increase in wages? This is a core part of modern minimum wage arguments and inequality.

The TRPF + racism + sexism thing.

Like said above: capital, profit, wages, value, surplus value etc are all different categories between one another. I am asking to elaborate in relation to TRPF because - being charitable here - you seem to not understand the differences between those and you are jumping on to conclusions from a superficial understanding that mashes them together.

And by being charitable, I mean that while I do feel that you are doing a bit (especially with the tone and taunting), I don’t mind taking your bait because there is a benefit for the audience by using that as pretext and working relevant ideas

BillsPhoenix
Jun 29, 2023
But what if Russia aren't the bad guys? I'm just asking questions...
So I want to be clear - Marx sometimes uses Classical Economic terms in unique ways. This isn't a fault or issue with Marx.

But using it as a "you don't understand" clause to me says you only know Marx, not other economic theories.

Profit as part of trpf has a lot of different methods of being calculated in execution, even if the theory is simple.

FirstnameLastname
Jul 10, 2022
Probation
Can't post for 18 hours!

BillsPhoenix posted:

I'll let a MIC goon respomd to the services are productive labor comment.

For my positions - I am fully a believer in the theory of exploitation of wages or surplus wages, surplus value. I'll caveat the US doesn't teach it this way, but it's my belief and in line with Marx.

TRPF is a good theory. I think it's one of many factors at a macro level. I don't think it's the only factor, nor do I believe it must result in a collapse. This is where I differ with Marx, and I don't belie e a lot of theories and claims that build off "inevitable collapse".


it doesn't build from that, it's not assumed as a truth to start out

it's mathematically the only conclusion you can reach when you look at a system that assumes infinite real expansion in a planet of fixed size and in an entropic universe with hard physical constants

the only route for continued growth is to profitably colonize space. even if the us knocked over china and was the only world govt, that would be the only option in the long run bc even if we were capable of profitably expanding underground, underwater, the poles, which we also aren't: each meter of earth can only support so much life and only has so many resources, only gets hit with so much energy from sunlight

otherwise you need people to embrace the metaverse and from the reception that stuff gets, i don't see it becoming something that can fuel the increasing growth required

spaceflight is incredibly cost and resource intensive, it isn't profitable, colonizing another planet would be unimaginably cost and resource intensive and even if succeeded would take a very long time before producing an overall profit higher than the cost of shipping human civilization to another planet
a round trip is four years because of the limited launch windows, it took like 150 years for the us colonial projects that were a 6mo wind-powered boatride away before it could become truly self-sustaining and that was in an environment that needed nothing special to survive that the place of origin did, and had its already established human populations, edible plant life, etc.

since interplanetary logistics has such a massive turnaround and is so expensive, a colony on mars ultimately needs to be able to make it's own basic ingredients to support biological life and everything up the chain from that to processors and vaccines and incubators

in an environment where the atmosphere is thin enough you'll get super cancer without a 6ft thick glass window and there's no liquid water or air to breathe and the lowered gravity fucks up your body and weakens your bones and muscles
and even then, it's by far the most habitable place except earth in the entire solar system, everywhere else incl space itself is significantly harder

capitalism has to get past those sets of hurdles in a way that's ultimately profitable in order to extend the clock past where it's already at now, otherwise it'll just continue to cannibalize itself like it has been since the 1970s barring the bursts of growth from aerospace, computerization, software, internet, cellphones + the illusion of growth made from capitalist arms industries developed to exploit other capitalist states or protect against exploitation by capitalist states & rebuilding efforts after capitalist wars destroy areas

this whole last few hundred years and especially last 30 are one enormous bubble of growth from technology, they're not at all the norm, not sustainable, you're seeing inertia from that giving this system wealth and a position of global dominance, not any inherent stability or strength to the capitalist system

Fat-Lip-Sum-41.mp3
Nov 15, 2003

BillsPhoenix posted:

So I want to be clear - Marx sometimes uses Classical Economic terms in unique ways. This isn't a fault or issue with Marx.

But using it as a "you don't understand" clause to me says you only know Marx, not other economic theories.

Profit as part of trpf has a lot of different methods of being calculated in execution, even if the theory is simple.

You're full of poo poo.

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


BillsPhoenix posted:

So I want to be clear - Marx sometimes uses Classical Economic terms in unique ways. This isn't a fault or issue with Marx.

But using it as a "you don't understand" clause to me says you only know Marx, not other economic theories.

Profit as part of trpf has a lot of different methods of being calculated in execution, even if the theory is simple.

Why not explain your take of TRPF and how it relates to the issues you have raised?

genericnick
Dec 26, 2012

BillsPhoenix posted:

So I want to be clear - Marx sometimes uses Classical Economic terms in unique ways. This isn't a fault or issue with Marx.

But using it as a "you don't understand" clause to me says you only know Marx, not other economic theories.

Profit as part of trpf has a lot of different methods of being calculated in execution, even if the theory is simple.

Marx defines his terms and then builds his argument. Nothing stops you from doing the same.

BillsPhoenix
Jun 29, 2023
But what if Russia aren't the bad guys? I'm just asking questions...
I have. I'm not sure what is missing. I have no critique of the theory.

My critique is the pointing at a chart and saying profits are falling is flawed. There's multiple variables at play which can explain falling profits. But because there's multiple variables it also doesn't mean trpf is wrong.

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


Also, one of the achievements of Marx was exactly going ahead and figuring out what Smith and Ricardo couldn’t elaborate on the matter. Smith’s “saturation of capital” was immediately considered insufficient to explain why it was a thing. Ricardo, in particular, started to get close (especially when reviewing the matter of structural employment due to technology, which he dismissed at first) but was unable to* offer a meaningful explanation.

* - or didn’t want to. There’s enough in Ricardo’s writings to infer that he got a glean of the why, but didn’t like one bit where it was going.

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


BillsPhoenix posted:

My #1 critique is the failure to address racism and sexism. This is a major issue for nearly all economic theories, but problematic for TRPF. Exploitation of surplus labor is a mandatory building block for TRPF.

to help you out, this is the part where you are criticizing and not offering a why.

Where it fails to address it? Why is it problematic?

Dreylad
Jun 19, 2001

dead gay comedy forums posted:

Also, one of the achievements of Marx was exactly going ahead and figuring out what Smith and Ricardo couldn’t elaborate on the matter. Smith’s “saturation of capital” was immediately considered insufficient to explain why it was a thing. Ricardo, in particular, started to get close (especially when reviewing the matter of structural employment due to technology, which he dismissed at first) but was unable to* offer a meaningful explanation.

* - or didn’t want to. There’s enough in Ricardo’s writings to infer that he got a glean of the why, but didn’t like one bit where it was going.

I've always wondered about that. I haven't read much of Ricardo but what I have it almost comes across if he's kind of freaked out about what his conclusions mean for the economy or capitalism.

FirstnameLastname
Jul 10, 2022
Probation
Can't post for 18 hours!

BillsPhoenix posted:

I have. I'm not sure what is missing. I have no critique of the theory.

My critique is the pointing at a chart and saying profits are falling is flawed. There's multiple variables at play which can explain falling profits. But because there's multiple variables it also doesn't mean trpf is wrong.

profits are always falling because there's a single shared pool of value generated within the capitalist system all profit is drawn from

all profit is, by definition, when a larger share of that value is extracted by an entity than introduced

it only works out one way, the only way to delay that is when market growth adds more to the pool than the capitalists can extract at the same time
the only real sources of growth are from populations, resources, and physical space for both of those to exist and the earth has a fixed size and fixed amount of resources available - it only works out one way, it's a feedback loop, that's how they work

Epic High Five
Jun 5, 2004



If the question is, "why didn't the rate of profit fall when the CRA went through and wages were raised?" I suppose my response would be "Did the median worker wage actually go up, and if so how much?"

Beyond that I'm having trouble grasping what you specific question or quandry is here, you seem to agree that the ROP drops and this is well supported, and explanations provided for why profit falling is as baked into Capitalism as profit seeking is, so I'm not sure what the missing piece here is.

Also as DGCF pointed out, a lot of the terminology and concepts Marx worked with were already in use by Smith and Ricardo, and would still be use regular use today if not for the post-WW2 consensus that materialism was to be stripped from all public and academic spaces. This is something that is abundantly clear in other ways like how fully financialized societies are incapable of interacting with the wider world in a coherent way, but it's also a whole different thing from this entirely I think.

Epic High Five has issued a correction as of 00:23 on Feb 7, 2024

Epic High Five
Jun 5, 2004



I remember vividly a discussion I had with a guy where I asked him "and what do we do when we run out of oil?" to which he responded "God will fill the Earth with more for us to extract"

To this day it's been the best single sentence summary of the anti-materialist worldview, liberals obviously obfuscate it more than that but that's the root of it. It's why the rate will always fall and why when we hit serious scarcity it's going to be something no system is prepared to deal with beyond smashing the "Time For Fascism" button that is the shorthand for bourgeois democracy in crisis

BillsPhoenix
Jun 29, 2023
But what if Russia aren't the bad guys? I'm just asking questions...

dead gay comedy forums posted:

to help you out, this is the part where you are criticizing and not offering a why.

Where it fails to address it? Why is it problematic?

Ah OK, I see. I'm not criticizing the theory for addressing racism or sexism.

I'm criticizing pointing at a chart of world profit declining, and saying the decline of profit is proof.

The movement as a whole significantly increased the cost of labor for capitalists, it wasn't just a shifting of money from one worker to another.

I haven't seen this related to trpf, rather as an explanation of the labor crisis of the 60s. But it would relate to trpf as this would explain the decline, not trpf.

bedpan
Apr 23, 2008

Epic High Five posted:

I remember vividly a discussion I had with a guy where I asked him "and what do we do when we run out of oil?" to which he responded "God will fill the Earth with more for us to extract"

To this day it's been the best single sentence summary of the anti-materialist worldview, liberals obviously obfuscate it more than that but that's the root of it. It's why the rate will always fall and why when we hit serious scarcity it's going to be something no system is prepared to deal with beyond smashing the "Time For Fascism" button that is the shorthand for bourgeois democracy in crisis

the abiotic oil people are great (not great)

Epic High Five
Jun 5, 2004



bedpan posted:

the abiotic oil people are great (not great)

It was very annoying to me at the time, but looking back on it 20 years later, I actually just really appreciate the straightforward honesty of the sentiment. It's ultimately what most people believe, but most people don't want to be honest about it.

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


BillsPhoenix posted:

Ah OK, I see. I'm not criticizing the theory for addressing racism or sexism.

I'm criticizing pointing at a chart of world profit declining, and saying the decline of profit is proof.

The movement as a whole significantly increased the cost of labor for capitalists, it wasn't just a shifting of money from one worker to another.

I haven't seen this related to trpf, rather as an explanation of the labor crisis of the 60s. But it would relate to trpf as this would explain the decline, not trpf.

Before elaborating further: what about prison labor in the USA + combined with corporations doing industrial transfer to LatAm + Asia?

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


And to set up the groundwork, do you feel that investing in a salt mine is a sound business idea nowadays?

mila kunis
Jun 10, 2011

Epic High Five posted:

If the question is, "why didn't the rate of profit fall when the CRA went through and wages were raised?"

It did. (however it wasn't just minority workers getting raised wages but general worker militancy and unionization that contributed to eating into capital's share of the profits)

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2022/01/22/a-world-rate-of-profit-important-new-evidence/


FirstnameLastname
Jul 10, 2022
Probation
Can't post for 18 hours!

dead gay comedy forums posted:

Before elaborating further: what about prison labor in the USA + combined with corporations doing industrial transfer to LatAm + Asia?


also note it's the tendency for the mean rate to fall

it's not claiming every instance of profit will always be reduced compared to the previous one or that it'll fall in the same area, its not saying profits can't increase in the short term or within certain areas

its saying the mean rate of profit overall under capitalism will tend to fall over time
so looking at other areas to refute(or assert) that will be confusing, forest n trees, u have to look at how stuff fits into the larger context

mila kunis
Jun 10, 2011

mila kunis posted:

marx didn't say "profits go down all the time" he said profitability has a tendency to fall, causing crises that need to be resolved. for example, post ww2 saw a tremendous rise in profits with the need to rebuild large parts of the world from the ashes of the war. the labour movement had a good time since profits were so high they could get in on the action while capitalist's could still take tremendous profits.

over time growth slows (since it isn't infinite), which meant the rate of return slowed, leading the crises of the 70s. workers share of profits was getting to be a huge drain on the rate of return. this basically led to a capital strike, inflation (same amount of money because fewer goods were being produced because of said capital strike, capitalists shut down a bunch of factories, so on). really bad crisis.

capital's solution was to destroy the labour movement, and ship industry abroad, which lead to a rise in profitability.

michael roberts (https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com) has a lot of stuff on profitability and the TRPF and he explains it in easy to understand language


dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


FirstnameLastname posted:

u have to look at how stuff fits into the larger context

(that’s the idea I am building here)

BillsPhoenix
Jun 29, 2023
But what if Russia aren't the bad guys? I'm just asking questions...

dead gay comedy forums posted:

Before elaborating further: what about prison labor in the USA + combined with corporations doing industrial transfer to LatAm + Asia?

I see prison labor as the continuation of slavery, which has generally declined long term but never been eliminated. Short term slavery in the US via prisons does seem to be on the rise, the recent report reiterated how difficult it is to measure.

Industry transfer is a lowering of wages. The 90s should see an initial rise in profits, but then as industries saturate that benefit should disappear. Similar to civil rights in the US, a country implementing worker rights should cut into that profit, which will kick off a new industry transfer. It will all get a bit noisy.

A salt mind in Australia should be profitable? In the US it wouldn't be prudent.

E: ignoring corruption/bribery issues with oz mining, it wouldn't be a good idea.

BillsPhoenix has issued a correction as of 01:01 on Feb 7, 2024

FirstnameLastname
Jul 10, 2022
Probation
Can't post for 18 hours!

dead gay comedy forums posted:

(that’s the idea I am building here)

oh my b i was adding on what you'd saying to op

BillsPhoenix
Jun 29, 2023
But what if Russia aren't the bad guys? I'm just asking questions...

FirstnameLastname posted:

also note it's the tendency for the mean rate to fall

Like 95% of macro economics work this way. Even most of the ones called "law of". Part of why economic is a soft or social science.

FirstnameLastname
Jul 10, 2022
Probation
Can't post for 18 hours!

BillsPhoenix posted:

Like 95% of macro economics work this way. Even most of the ones called "law of". Part of why economic is a soft or social science.

except it is demonstrable, when viewing the mean rate of profit within capitalism across time

economics is a fake science built off the false assumption that capitalist ideology is correct and cannot be all-around outperformed by other systems, it doesn't look at them and doesn't compare capitalism to anything except itself under capitalist metrics like gdp
it skips the first step to being an actual science, everything after that in the entire field is broken clock accuracy because of that alone imo

StashAugustine
Mar 24, 2013

Do not trust in hope- it will betray you! Only faith and hatred sustain.

Also isn't the entire political implication of TRPF that it's true if conditions don't change and thus capitalism is obsessed with changing those conditions- ie finding new labor to exploit?

BillsPhoenix
Jun 29, 2023
But what if Russia aren't the bad guys? I'm just asking questions...
You know marx was a respected economist right?

And that the soviets had economists? And China does today?

It's a study of resources, behavioral incentives (now it's entire own branch), and the impact at a micro or macro level.

Mandel Brotset
Jan 1, 2024

BillsPhoenix posted:

Ah OK, I see. I'm not criticizing the theory for addressing racism or sexism.

I'm criticizing pointing at a chart of world profit declining, and saying the decline of profit is proof.

The movement as a whole significantly increased the cost of labor for capitalists, it wasn't just a shifting of money from one worker to another.

I haven't seen this related to trpf, rather as an explanation of the labor crisis of the 60s. But it would relate to trpf as this would explain the decline, not trpf.

are you looking at graphs of the stonk market and confusing that for the rate of profit?

BillsPhoenix
Jun 29, 2023
But what if Russia aren't the bad guys? I'm just asking questions...
Mila Kunis posted one of the charts that seems to come up a fair bit on the topic. Dead Gay posted the IMF chart in another thread which broadly aligns.

I haven't seen a stock market chart that generally trends downward.

FirstnameLastname
Jul 10, 2022
Probation
Can't post for 18 hours!

BillsPhoenix posted:

You know marx was a respected economist right?

And that the soviets had economists? And China does today?

It's a study of resources, behavioral incentives (now it's entire own branch), and the impact at a micro or macro level.

western economic academia diverged from reality when they removed materialist concepts in ideological adherence to capitalism & anticommunism

Raskolnikov38
Mar 3, 2007

We were somewhere around Manila when the drugs began to take hold

mila kunis posted:

It did. (however it wasn't just minority workers getting raised wages but general worker militancy and unionization that contributed to eating into capital's share of the profits)

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2022/01/22/a-world-rate-of-profit-important-new-evidence/




i would need to dig into hard economic data to support this thesis but i'm of the opinion that the 1960s-1970s profitability crisis was an overproduction crisis. WW2 destroyed so much industrial capacity that the european powers + japan were able to experience several decades of large and constant economic growth while still having demand for american imports. however as the non-american powers rebuilt their industries and were able to supply their markets with domestic goods, the demand for american goods fell, hence the shift of the US to a persistent negative trade balance by 1960. by the end of the decade the industrial slack from war damage ran out and the capitalists were suddenly overproducing everything on a global scale. hence why the "post-war boom", "german/japanese/italian economic miracle," "trente glorieuses," "record years" all come to a crashing end with the dawning of the 1970s

e: oh lol you then linked a post from 2 years ago saying the exact same thing

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


alright, was phoneposting and that isn't very helpful to work all of it together

So, tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The underlined is the key idea to understand here.

Profits are not the same as profitability. This is the core that constitutes one of the most important of Marx's discoveries, that capitalism isn't about the generation of value, but of generation of its own ability to expand. In looking at profitability, we realize the why of superexploitation: there's material incentive to create discriminated groups of labor because more surplus value can be appropriated from those people.

Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter Ten: The Working-Day -- Section 7: The struggle for the normal working-day. Re-action of the English factory acts on other countries posted:

In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.

"Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter Fifteen: Machinery and Modern Industry -- Section 2: The value transferred by machinery to the product posted:

Before the labour of women and of children under 10 years of age was forbidden in mines, capitalists considered the employment of naked women and girls, often in company with men, so far sanctioned by their moral code, and especially by their ledgers, that it was only after the passing of the Act that they had recourse to machinery. The Yankees have invented a stone-breaking machine. The English do not make use of it, because the “wretch” [35] who does this work gets paid for such a small portion of his labour, that machinery would increase the cost of production to the capitalist. In England women are still occasionally used instead of horses for hauling canal boats, because the labour required to produce horses and machines is an accurately known quantity, while that required to maintain the women of the surplus-population is below all calculation. Hence nowhere do we find a more shameful squandering of human labour-power for the most despicable purposes than in England, the land of machinery.

Marx was very aware of superexploitation. Thus, it is already accounted for by the very nature of capitalism in relation to profit: because the different profitabilities can be averaged in relation to all surplus value in a given society.

"Capital, Vol. 3, Part II -- Chapter 10. Equalisation of the General Rate of Profit Through Competition. Market-Prices and Market-Values. Surplus-Profit posted:

On the other hand, it may be said that wherever an average profit, and therefore a general rate of profit, is produced — no matter by what means — such an average profit cannot be anything but the profit on the average social capital, whose sum is equal to the sum of surplus-value. Moreover, the prices obtained by adding this average profit to the cost-prices cannot be anything but the values transmuted into prices of production. Nothing would be altered if capitals in certain spheres of production would not, for some reason, be subject to the process of equalization.

Labor discrimination is one of the most reliable methods - indeed is to be always expected - of refining appropriation of surplus value, i.e. excuses to pay lesser wages. Others did eventually realize the same: Keynes couldn't account in his general theory for wage value and growth when all indicators pointed that given all conditions, capital will always seek to pay the smallest possible value for labor. He deferred to the socialists and communists there and then: it is labor power that is the imperative factor for wage expansion in real value. By having discrimination, capital manages to preserve profitability in creating categories subject to superexploitation.

And by it being accounted for, superexploitation does not save capital from itself, i.e. it doesn't circumvent the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. mila kunis posted there a chart that is helpful to understand this: even by sending industry overseas to the much cheaper Asian labor, corporate profits didn't recover the same profitability from earlier periods. They had incredible profits, but didn't earn as much profit as they once did.

This befuddled political economy since the beginning. Adam Smith was among the first to try tackling this by arguing for his idea of saturation of capital: as more capital gets invested in industry and/or competition increases (remember that he was writing at the early days of industrial revolution so he had an idea of a "market of peer competitors"), the profit in relation to production would fall when accounting that capital doesn't change itself on the process -- i.e. the machinery and tools to produce stuff do not magically reproduce themselves when stuff gets made. Ricardo then shoots it down because that only holds water when considering a segment of economy, not as the whole of it -- he figures out the problem of diminishing returns of conditions of scale. Marx then builds upon his critique to assert the technological factor of productivity and that the technical power of labor naturally costs more to operate: capital gains larger profits but loses profitability because that technical factor requires more wages.

And profitability, again, is what matters. I mentioned salt because it is an ubiquitous good nowadays except in the most dire corners of the world. In the Antiquity, it was incredibly valuable for being fundamental for health and for food preservation, to the point that the word salary comes from the Roman accounting of salt-stipend for soldiers and public officers (iirc). With the industrial revolution, salt mining and saline works were able to produce far, far more than ever, while also having the means and infrastructure to transport before-unthinkable quantities of salt around the world. It is this point where the profitability of the salt trade reached its highest -- being a human necessity, it was an incredibly reliable investment for capitalists to do.

As saline works and mines expanded, with immense amounts of back-breaking labor from imperialized subjects and also with ever larger and more powerful machinery elsewhere, salt stops offering the same profits as it once did. Supply becomes very large and technical means - capital in the form of machinery - provide gigantic amounts of productivity, while imperialism can't do more than what it already does. It has achieved a degree of development where it cannot deliver higher than average profit for its production -- if capital stays there, it cannot expand in the rate that it is necessary to self-sustain. It must become investment elsewhere, where profitability allows for that to happen.

Did salt stop being profitable? Surely not. However, if you ask a financier if they want to invest on a salt commodity stocks or to get the same value in Tesla/Amazon/Apple/etc options, they will look at you with the biggest "duh" in their faces. This is TRPF -- the fact that capital expansion necessarily annihilates its own profitability. Even with peak counter-measures (imperialism and fascism in turbo mode), it cannot prevent or break that fundamental logic, the core contradiction of capitalism.

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy

BillsPhoenix posted:

My critique is the pointing at a chart and saying profits are falling is flawed.

https://i.imgur.com/BtgZ6Ce.mp4

while I agree that pointing to this chart and assuming that TRPF is the thing driving the falling profits is flawed, what you have to do is right-click on the clip to get the context menu, then left-click on "Unmute"

then, when combined with the flames and big face of Marx in the background, that should tell you that it is in fact TRPF that's doing it

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Aeolius
Jul 16, 2003

Simon Templeman Fanclub
sexism and racism are important battles in the class war writ large, but understand that when industry exploits a subset of people extra hard, this is reflected in supernormal rates of surplus value, which are only one variable in calculating the rate of profit. the "wage squeeze" theory of rates of profit can help account for shorter-term movements, but the longer-term phenomenon has to do with technical change itself, with an ever rising organic composition of capital.

at the end of the day, the rate of profit is a flow of value in the numerator and a stock of capital in the denominator. the stock compounds on the basis of the flow from the previous period; that is, no matter how fast the numerator grows, a very profitable year means more investment back into capital stock, so the denominator grows in proportion. the gradual constriction is inevitable without some kind of exogenous reduction in total social capital

however, an important caveat: TRPF does not amount to a proximate but rather an underlying cause of crisis. it's not "the rate of profit is 5% instead of 10%, therefore now we crisis"; rather, with lower profitability, everything is some flavor of less stable, more precarious & fragile, with thinner margins, etc., and if the state steps in to try to keep the more proximal shocks from triggering a full-on crisis, we instead get an era of broad stagnation

Aeolius has issued a correction as of 07:15 on Feb 7, 2024

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