2 ms·

I agree with a lot of what you just said, I think Marx was correct about the idea that capitalism requires the growth. I would state his thesis as follows: If y

by js8 6y ago

I agree with a lot of what you just said, I think Marx was correct about the idea that capitalism requires the growth. I would state his thesis as follows: If you reward continued production of goods (which requires investment) with property, eventually you will run out of property to give away. I believe in the 20th century, this conundrum was resolved in enormous growth of what we consider to be property assets. We have not only reached the limit of exploitation of natural resources on the planet, but also added intelectual property, military-industrial complexes, various financial instruments, healthcare, and as of late, we have monetized human attention and behavioral data. On top of that, we monetized human servitude, now lot of well-off people are in debt (at least with mortgages and student loans).

vidarh 6y ago
It's not so much that you run out of property, but that you run out of ability to expand your customer base fast enough to see fast growth, and the slower growth capitalists can get from external factors, such as new markets, the more incentives they have to look to internal factors to maintain their competitive advantage. Ultimately that means addressing labour costs. For an individual capitalist it makes sense to drive labour costs towards zero. But if everyone does it, then their markets shrink unless there are external factors (e.g. UBI or similar) that counters the market-wide effects of their reduction in labor costs. This is also why UBI is a "liberal" (in the classical, not US sense) policy, and not something the socialist left is very interested in - from a socialist point of view UBI is bread and circus to keep capitalism from imploding.