Rate of Profit Anonymous 06-05-23 00:29:29 No. 13726
With all the corporate consolidations and acquisitions and mergers at an all time high and with banks collapsing left and right. Is the ROP just tanking? And I mean so low that there's no way to draw any more profit except through more and more consolidation. To me it seems that the ROP has gone into the negatives and shareholders primacy is the only policy, abandoning long term plans for short term quarterly results.
Anonymous 06-05-23 05:04:49 No. 13731
>>13729 The problem with Marx's conception of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is twofold:
1. It assumes that the labor theory of value is true
2. It takes the guise of a scientific theory, yet no meaningful predictions can be made with it.
Anonymous 06-05-23 05:15:15 No. 13733
I'm gonna do it, I'm going to do what all /leftypol/ers fear, the most disgusting reply I can think of.
Here:
>>13731 I disagree, and your opinion is so silly and misinformed, I am going to not respond because it's more likely that you come from bad faith. Anonymous 07-05-23 00:42:50 No. 13748
>>13747 A "tendency for the rate of profit to fall" is less a prediction than an observation of past behavior, hence "tendency." If I tend to do something, I will likely do it in the future, but whether I do or don't in a given time frame will be contingent on other factors. "Tendency" suggests I will at some point, but whether I do or don't in some particular instance is separate from whether the observation describes the long term correctly.
While Marx does predict the tendency also exists in the long term, he describes countervailing tendencies that imply the rate of profit's long term tendency to fall will not necessarily be true in particular time frames. This sort of short term/long term distinction isn't peculiar to Marxism, or to political economy and economics. The second law of thermodynamics is a statistical tendency that can be violated, even if it's highly unlikely to happen in most cases.
Anonymous 07-05-23 01:27:46 No. 13752
>>13739 profit and rate of profit are two different things.
I sell a $10 item and get $3 profit on it but then later I only get $2 profit on it per $10 sold. The rate of profit has fallen. But I go from selling a million products to 2 million. Rate of profit fell by 1/3 but total profits are up by 1/3.
Anonymous 07-05-23 04:02:04 No. 13763
>>13761 >Welfare states are a result of electoral democracy, giving workers the voting rights will eventually degenerate companies into welfare units Yes, corporations will provide money and other benefits for the overall welfare of those who work there like healthcare, dental care, etc. In fact, this may surprise you, but many corporations already do offer some or all of these benefits to some extent.
Labor-managed firms also already exist; the most well-known is the workers cooperative Mondragon. Even within a neoclassical framework, labor-managed firms are entirely viable.
Anonymous 07-05-23 04:03:13 No. 13764
>>13739 Yet investment in the means of production has also hit record lows. The USA has lost tonnage outputs across the board for heavy industry like steel as American capitalists simply hasn't invested in industry since the fall of the Soviet Union. This is why even the US Military industrial Complex can't complex even with modern Russia with mass production of arms due industry starving for reinvestment.
All those profits are short sighted as come at the cost of US industry falling father and farther behind its competitors that are investing in production.
Anonymous 07-05-23 04:17:33 No. 13765
>>13763 >corporations will provide money and other benefits for the overall welfare of those who work there like healthcare, dental care Yea but they reached that point due to workers not having vooting powers and their predecessors working their ass out to make company revenue. After you reach a certain point of prosperity its easy to provide these amenities and focus more on employ welfare.
Yea but its still under capitalism with markets and are a minority
Anonymous 07-05-23 04:47:12 No. 13766
>>13765 >Yea but its still under capitalism with markets and are a minority You said:
>>electoral democracy in politics have proven to be a inefficient lets implement it in workplace… what could go wrong >giving workers the voting rights will eventually degenerate companies into welfare units Neither of which is true empirically. If your contention is that people won't work under socialism, that isn't true either in the case of "actually existing socialism" or in the case of the more socialistic kibbutzim in Israel.
Also, if you're the one advocating for monarchy, monarchy makes even less sense from the point of view of efficiency. If a monarch is mentally stable, intelligent, and healthy, the state will at the very least tend to function as well as any other, all else being equal, but these qualities are hardly guaranteed historically. Primogeniture is always a matter of genetic chance, and, if the successor is nominated from within the royal family or within the nobility, this doesn't guarantee continuous and stable administration, even if the monarch in question is successful, intelligent, and so forth (e.g. Marcus Aurelius and Commodus).
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