America Is Running Out of Everything The global supply chain is slowing down at the very moment when Americans are demanding that it go into overdrive. By Derek Thompson

  • LeninWeave [none/use name]
    ·
    3 years ago

    All possible responses, yeah. Marx also had a list of things that help (temporarily) raise the rate of profit, which I'm going to copy from Wikipedia.

    • More intense exploitation of labor (raising the rate of exploitation of workers).
    • Reduction of wages below the value of labor power (the immiseration thesis).
    • Cheapening the elements of constant capital by various means.
    • The growth of a relative surplus population (the reserve army of labor) which remained unemployed.
    • Foreign trade reducing the cost of industrial inputs and consumer goods.
    • The increase in the use of share capital by joint-stock companies, which devolves part of the costs of using capital in production on others.

    There's an economist (several, I think, but one that I know of off the top of my head) who's sort of made demonstrating the TRPF hypothesis his life's work. He's got a blog at thenextrecession.wordpress.com if you're interested in seeing modern, real-world data related to this.

    • Atavist [none/use name]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Thanks for the explanation and that blog. I'll check it out.

      But something's got to give at some point right, where it reaches a breaking point?

      • LeninWeave [none/use name]
        ·
        3 years ago

        But something’s got to give at some point right, where it reaches a breaking point?

        Yeah, and there's ways it can be mitigated. That blog has some sort-of-case-studies about it. But the idea of the TRPF hypothesis is that it's eventually not reconcilable and the economy will destroy itself. For example, imagine an economy where no one worked and everything was fully automated. How would it be possible to profit?

          • LeninWeave [none/use name]
            ·
            3 years ago

            I always hesitate to use "inevitable" because it feels like counting chickens before they've hatched. For example, society could destroy itself in a climate apocalypse. :agony-mescaline:

            But, like, eventually? Yeah, things should tend towards it.

    • bottech [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      The growth of a relative surplus population (the reserve army of labor) which remained unemployed.

      Isnt it equavilent to the more intense exploitation since it does it by facilitating the more intense exploitation? If so why include it as a separate point?

      Also another way to increase the rate of profit is establishment of monopolies