Is Capitalism transforming, must we have a citizen’s income because it can’t offer enough people jobs?. Thinking about this leads me to the theories about the declining rate of profit. I decided that Wikipedia would be the most intellectually accessible.

Amongst other things, it says,

The central idea that Marx had, was that overall technological progress has a long-term “labor saving bias”, and that the overall long-term effect of saving labor time in producing commodities with the aid of more and more machinery had to be a falling rate of profit on production capital,

This depends on the assumption that only Labour can produce surplus value and in a software managed world, I am not sure its true. It may also depend upon the idea that capital is and has been homogeneous over time; I am of the view that Capital Productivity has been reset and rebooted by the five technological revolutions. I also question if Labour is as it was and how the increasing value of information, knowledge and human capital impacts these theories. Marx also stated that nature is a source of wealth and production; it’s not exclusively about Labour. I think I need to read the fragment of the machines, and write a review of the second machine age.

Profit

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