Yes, there is a maximum level of extraction available to any mode of production at a given technology level.
This can only be overcome by increasing the productivity of capital (more tech) expanding into new extractive areas (imperialism) or eating your own seed corn and either reducing labour below substinence or liquidating sections of the proles or ruling class (fascism)
Or you know moving to some kind of new mode of production…
This is where the concept of commodity frontier comes to be very useful.
I believe the idea is that at some point wages become so low that the working class cannot socially reproduce itself
I’m actually reading Book 1 of Capital now, and chapter 6 discusses this.
Also touched upon in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, although in reverse (counterpoint to the “iron law of wages”)
Isnt that what the tendency if the rate of profit to fall is? More investment for smaller gains the more established an industry becomes. Theres a meme or short story about the last monopoly owning everything and thus not having anyone to sell said everything to, but i cant remember it.
How does this work with the velocity of money
Can you elaborate how these two need further explanation together? I’m familiar enough with both concepts, but not sure what your question is
Idk I’m kinda dumb
I did a bit more reading though and I guess as capital monopolizes everything, money changes hands less often when one corporation owns hundreds of companies, so that kinda takes the velocity of money out of the equation
It can be confusing, no shame in asking.
Is what you describe not just a cause of decreasing velocity? Why does that mean it’s no longer relevant to the discussion of the tendency to the rate of profit to fall?
I think that velocity is mostly irrelevant or at least has no causal relationship with the TRPTF. Because it’s just the organic composition of capital which changes, because less money switches hands through labour purchase and more for fixed capital. Hoarding is more likely, but that’s secondary.
But there could be other interactions I’m not thinking of, so I’d be curious what made you want to ask first?
In Capitalism in the Web of Life, Jason D. Moore posits that the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is really a manifestation of the tendency of the ecological surplus to decline. He lays out how the organization of society-and-nature (they are the same thing btw) creates limits to available ecological surplus, and new technological and social innovations enable weakening modes of organization to break into new frontiers of ecological capitalization. Each of these successive reorganizations (think: mercantilism, settler-colonialsm, fossil industrialism, monopoly imperialism, financialization, etc) more and more quickly burn through the ecological surplus available to them. This is the cause of cyclical capitalist crises, as cheap food, fuel, labor, and nature are chewed up in hungrier and hungrier systems with shorter lifespans than their predecessors. Pure digital financialization is the current desperate effort to wring profit out of a situation where natural surplus is at an all time low and human demand is at an all time high.
If for nothing else then the heat death of the universe
I mean, that’s what you get, when you keep on trying to replace wage and salaried labor with more innovative property (variable for constant capital), for productive sakes…
That literally drives the profit rate’s falling tendencies
There is no limit to accumulation itself (=> profit), but there is a law of diminishing returns, so to speak
Profit itself can trend towards infinity, but the rate at which it is extracted has a tendency to fall; in theory, a low rate of profit can continue for several centuries towards that $$$
In practice, however, we have to consider that war (and other means) can contribute to a destruction of capital; that unequal trade relations exist; that climate catastrophe is on the horizon; that humans cannot live forever; and so on.
tl;dr - assuming humans live forever, there is nothing setting a limit on profit itself
Rosa Luxembourg would probably disagree with me here and claim capitalism has a tendency towards its own collapse under the weight of its contradictions. For the moment, I do not share this viewpoint; I believe capitalism can only end by workers’ self-conscious activity towards that aim and towards their own abolition.
i don’t think the two things are so different
Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet
Money is a lubricant.
There’s a joke here about ass pennies. I haven’t had enough coffee to articulate it though.
