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I haven't encountered this argument before. Could you expand on this a bit? Or point toward some articles on the topic? Thanks!

• staplers 6y ago
  Not OP, but they might be alluding to the fact resource scarcity often leads to war
• vidarh 6y ago
  The argument dates back to Marx. Marx explicitly (already in the Communist Manifesto) argued that as capitalists run out of new markets to conquer, competition will force them to find their savings elsewhere, and that would inherently mean lowering costs of raw materials or lowering manufacturing costs, and that this this ultimately leads to conflict over property rights and driving down labour costs. He further predicted that this eventual pressure to drive down labour costs would push capitalism into a series of worsening crises on the assumption that driving down labour costs would drive down the market, and leave the market with over-capacity, and so intensify conflict. Basically Marx assumption was to take capitalists on their word that the free market will drive profit margins towards zero, coupled with the assumption that a lot of people have a lot of vested interest in preventing their profits from going towards zero and will do almost anything to prevent that from happening.