/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

https://gauthierroussilhe.com/en/articles/how-to-use-computing-power-faster
Courtesy of >>>/tech/31265

>>16630
Can't this tendency just be counteracted by producing a vast amount of new non-capital producing sectors and a ton of consumer junk?

The rulers printed lots and lots of fictitious money from 2000 on, and the way money is used is not at all like it was in the 19th century. There is no actual labor or value backing this fictitious money. The reality is that the past 60 years have seen a policy of deliberate and crushing economic contraction. This is something the rulers will tell you is the goal. They do not want a productive economy and speak of how such an economy is evil.

Under the present order, "profit" was replaced with the destruction of human beings. The more humans suffer and are destroyed, the greater the success of the present system. The most glorified firms and professions are those tasked with the destruction of the people. That is what is incentivized and what bonuses are paid for. You are not paid for producing things or any industriousness. If you think that is the problem, you quickly realize the industrial needs of humanity are either already met, or have been deliberately neglected and could be met very easily if only this were allowed. Most of the productive economy has been centralized under a few really big firms or conglomerates that fix prices, such that there is not the imagined competition between many firms that drove the profit motive. (The truth of course is that the drive towards mechanization in the 19th century was never the result of free enterprise or "chaos", and you can already see collusion and price fixing then to protect monopolies and corner the market.)

A naive reading of Capital is wholly inappropriate, and wasn't even really how things worked in the 19th century. The TFRP was about a tendency inherent in mechanization itself; that as more of capital were comprised of machinery and "dead labor", it would become harder to squeeze more profit out of the system without outright cannibalization of the people and the firms involved. This is exactly what happened, intended beforehand and glorified. In the 19th century, a naive faith in the society to produce of its own accord productive machinery was somewhat effective, since there were a lot of men looking to make something of themselves and they could only do so by making a product that was not readily available. By the 20th century, this slowed down to a crawl and was controlled by the commanding heights of the bourgeois, who did not want "new men" and deliberately set out to crush them. In the final decades of the 20th century, it was actively reversed. Now the men of business specialized in cannibalizing existing firms and machinery, and they glorified cocaine-fueled orgies and told you this was brilliant. That's why we are told to lionize Elon Musk today, whose entire thing is scamming and nepotism. Cannibalization became the highest priority of the ruling order, since their greatest imperative was to eliminate anything that could disrupt the orderly theft of the world. The people will have nothing, and they will be very unhappy.

Good news, well good except that unless they pull up I expect the burgers and europeans to be eating each other in the streets instead of being sensible about this

Timeline may have moved up to 2040 to 2065 based on humanoid robots now that there's "good enough" AI, kind of

We'll see, if it's true funny line should start going down faster over the next 15 years in aggregate

>>25381
One possible counterexample to funny line going down in aggregate that is funny except for the people eating each other in the streets (if it's not done sensibly with communism) is an enormous peak at 2040 because there's still the 2065-2075 implied by linear mapping of the peaks to 2075

>>25381
Never mind when humanoid robots would be useful. The problem with any such machine is that humans are cheaper and will always be cheaper. A fleet of robots requires regular service, engineers, managers. Also, you will find that how the robots are disciplined and managed is basically the same thing a manager would do to a human.

All of this talk has been an masturbatory fantasy of the petty-managerial fags, and they are fags. Anyone in management who is smart knows this idea will not work and is superfluous anyway. It would be cheaper to pay the humans their vacation time and let them have nice things again than to do this.

Now you may say "you can't treat humans like machines!!!111". The problem is, we did that. That was the dominant idea of the 20th century, and the whole society was organized on the idea that humans would be mechanical, thinking, rational actors. Any human who wasn't a "rational actor" regarding a clearly monstrous system was shamed and told they were guilty of numerous crimes that are not actual crimes, while these same honest humans saw murderers and rapers glorified by the same managers who did this to them.

If you actually did treat humans like machines for productive use, you would not have done the insane, Satanic thing that was done in the 20th century. Again, it would have been cheaper to give the human machines their vacation time, and not lie to them about everything with the utmost contempt. So much of the pointless, cruel suffering of the past 100 years resulted from nothing more than pig-headed, malicious ignorance of the managers and the political class, who ignored that humans have actual material and spiritual wants. Those humans were told "you're just machines, you're just animals", again while being told they have to exalt murderers and rapers. All of this has always an exultant shouting of the eugenists, of political elitists, and other such faggotry. It is not a reasonable plan for society and it was built so that humanity would never, ever know what that is like.

With all of that said, if you did have humanoid robots, or more generally effective multi-tasking autonomous robots capable of either thinking in a way similar to humans or at least a worth emulation of such, those robots would not replace humans. They would work alongside humans, and every worker would either command or be integrated with robotic workers (both of which amount to the same thing, since all of the work tasks these robots do exist to serve some human interest… the robots are not doing this for their own existence or some sense of themselves, and before you say "you can't say that is a given about humans", clearly the petty-managerial fags and ruling elite do this to perpetuate their own existence at our expense, and they take sadistic delight in telling us we're selected to die and that we will never be allowed anything ever again. The sadism was the soul of petty-managerialism more than any productive outcome the sadism made for the world.

Above all, the petty-managerial dogma insists that workers must be severed forcibly from their tools, from all connection to reality. It is a wholly Satanic cosmology. This is obviously a failed system, but none of us are allowed to say no to it.

One other thing about a robotic co-worker; it would be the bestest buddy a human worker could ever have, if it weren't programmed by disgusting assholes. Robots are cool and don't start stupid shit for drama. Amazingly, of all of the ways humans were made into robots, they didn't think to suppress the obviously disgusting backstabbing behavior of humans. Instead the machine essentialized every malicious thing humans did and insisted you were supposed to "respect" it, so that fag managers can keep stealing more stuff and hiring their buddies.