I think a tangential but very relevant read of the TRPF is that it explains the continued expansion of the capital and extraction frontier, and current-day colonialism and imperialism. The rate of profit can only rise by cutting costs or selling more while keeping costs relatively the same, therefore there is a constant need to find new labor pools that can be used to further cut costs, and at the same time, inserting that previously untapped population into the profit-generating system. That is why capitalism increasingly sticks its nose in the Global South, to extract labor, resources, and profit at very little cost.
That's very much true, though it also doesn't require TRPF to be a behavior of capital. Capital needs to locally maximize profit even if it's at some equilibrium or profits are already pretty high. It wants the overseas wage slave labor force in order to take profits of 30% instead of 25%. The system creates these monsters.
TRPF particularly derives, in real terms, as a greater acculation of debts that must be paid off. Those debts are the offset of not paying labor. One of Marx's driving insights was that automation was self-accelerating, and so companies would more and more quickly deprecate perfectly functional machines in order to stay competitive. This shifts costs not only away from labor, but away from maintenance and to debts to fund new machinery.
The most hortible consequence is the increasing power of finance capital due to such a shift. Marx thought it would be kept in check (and that workers demanding power would be part of that), but he ended up only being righy about both in the regrettably small number of countries that had successful revolutions. In capitalist countries, finance ran wild, so we get neoliberalism, which creates profit from the dismantling of productive forces.
We also come full circle there, as neoliberalism is also imperialist. It wants those extra profits in dismantling a healthcare system 6000 miles from the company's offices. In fact, it needs expansion even more than industrial capital, as it's built entirely on a house of cards and cannot increase its own productive forces (it doesn't produce!).
I think a tangential but very relevant read of the TRPF is that it explains the continued expansion of the capital and extraction frontier, and current-day colonialism and imperialism. The rate of profit can only rise by cutting costs or selling more while keeping costs relatively the same, therefore there is a constant need to find new labor pools that can be used to further cut costs, and at the same time, inserting that previously untapped population into the profit-generating system. That is why capitalism increasingly sticks its nose in the Global South, to extract labor, resources, and profit at very little cost.
That's very much true, though it also doesn't require TRPF to be a behavior of capital. Capital needs to locally maximize profit even if it's at some equilibrium or profits are already pretty high. It wants the overseas wage slave labor force in order to take profits of 30% instead of 25%. The system creates these monsters.
TRPF particularly derives, in real terms, as a greater acculation of debts that must be paid off. Those debts are the offset of not paying labor. One of Marx's driving insights was that automation was self-accelerating, and so companies would more and more quickly deprecate perfectly functional machines in order to stay competitive. This shifts costs not only away from labor, but away from maintenance and to debts to fund new machinery.
The most hortible consequence is the increasing power of finance capital due to such a shift. Marx thought it would be kept in check (and that workers demanding power would be part of that), but he ended up only being righy about both in the regrettably small number of countries that had successful revolutions. In capitalist countries, finance ran wild, so we get neoliberalism, which creates profit from the dismantling of productive forces.
We also come full circle there, as neoliberalism is also imperialist. It wants those extra profits in dismantling a healthcare system 6000 miles from the company's offices. In fact, it needs expansion even more than industrial capital, as it's built entirely on a house of cards and cannot increase its own productive forces (it doesn't produce!).
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