Capitalism's Fatal Flaw, and the Way Forward: On Marx’s “Theory of Capitalism”.

Saturday, August 21, 2021

On Marx’s “Theory of Capitalism”.

On Marx’s “Theory of Capitalism”.

Dear Reader,

I recently posted the following response to a Quora question: “What is Marx’s Theory of Capitalism?” –

Marx’s four-volume treatise, entitled “Capital: A Critique of Political Economy”, sought to lay bare the [political-]economic law of motion of modern [i.e., of capitalist] society.

Marx did indeed have what should be called a “theory of capitalism”.

In a nutshell, Marx showed how “the growth of the social forces of production” — ~ of social productivity; of the rate of social reproduction — incentivized by the capitalist profit motive itself, eventually attacked capital as dominant “social relation of production”, in the form of accumulated fixed capital value, technologically devaluing it due to its technological-competitive obsolescence, in a way that reduced periodic profit-rate in each accounting period in which techno-devalued fixed capital-value was written-off against gross profit.

This is Marx’s famous, crucial “law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall” when placed in its concrete context of the competition among capitals.

Marx’s general theory of human social evolution/-revolution holds that the “social relations of production”, such as “the capital-relation” in modern society, begin, in each epoch of human social development, as catalysts for further growth of “the social forces of production”, i.e., of human-societal self-reproductivity.

However, as this process unfolds, those “social relations of production” necessarily turn into constraints that break, brake, and even begin to reverse that productive-force growth.

This then leads to an era of increasing crises whose higher outcome, if achieved, is a social revolution that sprouts the seeds of a higher social relation of production that had already been forming within the old society — a new social relation of social reproduction that resumes and furthers the growth of the societal self-reproductive self-force of humanity for another epoch of social evolution.

Marx’s “Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall” is just the capital-relation-specific, capital-epoch-specific case of Marx’s general ‘‘‘law of human-social evolution/revolution’’’.

For more information regarding these insights, please see --

www.dialectics.info

For partially pictographical, ‘poster-ized’ visualizations of many of these insights -- specimens of ‘dialectical art’ -- see: