/edu/ - Education

yeah sure there are countertendencies
Marx listed many but long term the trend is down scheduled to approach 0 from 2050 to 2070 depending on how you do the linear approximation

In order to avert the general tendency of the rate of profit to fall, you'd have to either stop innovation from happening (and the balance of input costs from shifting toward capital over labor) or just churning out new products that are very labor intensive. The former would require total monopoly, state capitalism, or something similar. The latter would require unbounded population growth.

>>16620

what would you say these countertendencies are?

would be interested in finding more marxist critiques of marx himself, haven't found many academically even.

>>16621

right so, innovation takes place reducing labour time, labour creates value of a product, machinery and removal of social relation towards production then reduces the value of said product which also affects costs like its purchase of parts or how much it's sold for, and thus the capitalist is not gearing a positive return on his investment, so the rate of profit falls and falls as things get more efficient and as man toils less?

am I getting that right?

>>16623
and a population can only grow so much and or have livable quarters and societal space only so much, thus a limitation for demographics of any market, it can't expand which capital requires for its constant accumulation and for reciruclating manufacturing and consumption, these limits means a limit to create profit, can only go so high and hit a ceiling?

>>16623
Innovation doesn't necessarily reduce labor time in itself. What it does is make each commodity use less living labor (as in a worker making the commodity directly) and more dead labor (as in the other inputs, capital, or things that were produced by labor in the past). You might have more labor happening overall and indeed more profit overall, but the point is that any given commodity has a smaller proportion of its cost coming from the labor (wages), meaning there is a smaller margin for the capitalist to skim off. They can't skim off the purchases of capital because those purchases are made from other capitalists so one company's gain would equal another company's loss and the net profit for the capitalist class is zero. Profit can only be obtained by taking more from the workers than you give them back (forcing them to do value-creating labor that goes unpaid).

>>16624
>and a population can only grow so much and or have livable quarters and societal space only so much
That but moreso they can only grow so fast. Even assuming infinite resources there are limits on that and capitalism would probably still outstrip human reproduction. In reality of course you also have to contend with falling birth rates in countries that have industrialized, because people switch from "have 8 kids and hope 3 live to adulthood" to "have 2 kids who you assume will both go to college" family planning. And then neoliberalism reduces the number further as people aren't willing to bring kids into life under worse conditions than they grew up with.
>these limits means a limit to create profit, can only go so high and hit a ceiling?
Not quite, see >>16625 it's about the RATE of profit specifically. Total profits keep going up in the long run but the problem is that if you put 100 million dollars into a business that used to give you back 110 million is now only giving back 105 million, and then 102 million, etc. The bourgeois economic equivalent to the concept is return on investment (ROI), which is important because it determines whether investing is worth the risk. If the investment is deemed too risky or not profitable enough then capitalists won't invest and the industry starts to grind to a halt.

Often you see a very low rate of profit for industries of great importance, precisely because they are important. Like infrastructure. The reason for this is that because of their importance there is more focus, more production, and innovations happen there quickly, making the rate of profit fall faster than in other industries. What you end up with then is a situation where you have to nationalize production if you want to be able to keep these industries going at a functional level, more or less producing things at cost and paid for by taxes because they're just necessary. Neoliberalism comes along saying "hmm we can squeeze a little profit out of this by privatizing" and they're not wrong about that but in order to do it they have to cut corners which then seriously undermine the products of that industry.

why economics is not and cannot be an empirical science under capitalism episode n: the anarchy in production means that data which otherwise should be pretty straightforward to ascertain like one firm’s rate of profit as compared with another, or many firms’ rates of profit over a given time, actually requires much effort and is often impossible to acquire in many cases. you can do it at an industry scale with input output tables, but anything more granular than that and your data becomes very scarce very quickly. and so we are stuck with math people arguing about whose model looks the best while never acknowledging that we have not the power to look at the books of every capitalist and actually settle the question at hand.

>>16627
Seems logically right, there is no possibility for the correct statistics to be done here without any actual data which will probably not be available, and even if so would be a massive task to look at any public documents or reports on profits and finances of any large company or companies.

>>16626

Births like anything else are a social relation that is materially subject to external or internal influences and contradictions, and to that you say Birth Rates and the effect of industrialisation and living standards, I absolutely missed that and had made a truism or naturalistic assumption of progressive growth when Birth Rates can fluctuate, good spot there!

>>16622
>what would you say these countertendencies are?
>would be interested in finding more marxist critiques of marx himself, haven't found many academically even.
Its not a critique. Notice how its the "tendency" for the profit rate to fall.

Profit rate falls because the share of material capital grows in relation to the rate of organic capital. IE you have to pay more for the upkeep or replacement of machines relatively than for labour, meaning that there is less total labour in society to be put into creating new capital and more is spend on maintaining what we already have.

The counter tendency is situations where labour saving in one sectors brings down the capital cost in another. Such as improving steel production by 30%. That makes machine upkeep cheaper in terms of labour, and frees labour to build new capital.

But in practice, the implementation of labour saving technologies in non-capital-producing sectors outpaces that of capital producing sectors (because the sectors that produced non-capital commodities, such as food, clothing, etc, are smaller than those that produce or work to maintain material capital), meaning that overall, there is more and more machines that need to be maintained relatively.

>>16630
Thank you for rare theory post