Capitalism's Fatal Flaw, and the Way Forward

Wednesday, April 29, 2026

¿In What Sense do Objects of Value “Contain” Labor-Time?

¿In What

Sense

Objects

of Value

“Contain”

Labor-

Time?

Dear Reader,

¿In what sense do objects of human valuing – objects “produced” by human labor, and that have use-value, “value”, exchange-value and price – “contain” the labor-time that produced them?

The metaphor of human labor-time “containment” in commodity-objects is encountered frequently in Marx’s discourses on his “law of value”, in his immanent critique of the capitalist ideology/science of “political economy”.

Well, first of all, it does not mean that the aggregate of human labor-hours that were spent on “working-up” raw material – material not produced by human labor, but, instead, produced by pre-human/exo-human Nature – that were applied in the individual history of each individual commodity-object – are “contained” inside that commodity-object.

For a present such commodity-object, that labor-time counts as so “contained” only to the extant of the average abstract labor-time socially necessary to reproduce that object presently, given the presently prevailing level of the social force of its production, in the field of production under which it falls, as reflected, albeit in a complex manner, in its presently-prevailing price. Any labor-hours applied in its individual case, above and beyond that social average, does not count as “contained in it”, or as adding to its value/price.

If, by today, an innovation has spread society-wide that enables units of that same object-kind to be produced, on average, within half the generic labor-hours it took to make that object a year before, then each unit of an inventory of that object, produced, e.g., the year before, “suddenly”, “instantaneously”, i.e., given price-competition in its market, against such objects produced today, will have its value, and its price, drop accordingly, despite the average number of generic labor-hours actually applied, per unit, in its batch.

Sometimes one might get the feeling that the abstract labor-time “contained” in a produced commodity-object represents something like the “time-binding” of which Korzybski wrote. But the amount of abstract labor-time “bound into” a given unit of commodity-product is not a locally measurable quantity of generic labor-hours. Its effective amount depends on market competition – is, in effect, influenced by the “action at a distance” of generic labor-hours “cost of production” of similar, competitively-equivalent commodity-objects, produced “at a distance”, elsewhere.

The human “working-up” [Marx] of raw materials, into a finished commodity product, sometimes “sounds”, in Marx’s discourse, like an addition of “order”, of a, to humans, use-valuable kind, a ‘negentropy-added’ form of “value-added”.

However, in terms of saleable price, that “negentropy-value” is contingent upon the amount of economic value added per unit by the production of such commodity-objects elsewhere, even if the ‘order-added’ to the raw material, and the ‘use-value-added’ is the same there.

The ‘labor-value-added’ requires that, in the same process, there must be a specific use-value-added – that, whatever the amount of generic labor-time added, that labor-time added must add to the use-value of each unit of the commodity-objects output for a specific use, relative to that use-value for the inputs to its production, or no economic value will be added.

However, given rising productivity, or rising “productive force”, in that branch of production, the same ‘use-value-added’ will “contain” less ‘exchange-value-added’, less ‘price-added’ by the generic-labor-time-added, than that for commodity-objects of the same kind produced earlier, before the rise in the “productive force” of their production.

Thus, the “abstract, presently socially-necessary labor-time” metaphor of labor-time “containment” has to be carefully couched within key exceptions if it is to be made apt.

General inflation also takes its toll on consumers, for many kinds of commodity-objects all-at-once, by raising unit-prices of commodity-kinds across-the-board, even despite falling socially-necessary abstract-labor-time ‘containings’.

For more information regarding these Seldonian insights, and to read and/or download, free of charge, PDFs and/or JPGs of Foundation books, other texts, and images, please see:

www.dialectics.info

and

https://independent.academia.edu/KarlSeldon

For partially pictographical, ‘poster-ized’ visualizations of many of these Seldonian insights -- specimens of ‘dialectical art’ – as well as dialectically-illustrated books published by the F.E.D. Press, see –

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¡ENJOY!

Regards,

Miguel Detonacciones,

Voting Member, Foundation Encyclopedia Dialectica [F.E.D.];

Elected Member, F.E.D. General Council;

Participant, F.E.D. Special Council for Public Liaison;

Officer, F.E.D. Office of Public Liaison.

YOU are invited to post your comments on this blog-entry below!

Saturday, April 25, 2026

Some Possible Triggers for ‘The Great Transition’ and ‘Global Renaissance’. GLOBAL STRATEGIC HYPOTHESES.

Some

Possible

Triggers

for

‘The Great

Transition’

and

‘Global Renaissance’.

GLOBAL STRATEGIC HYPOTHESES.

Dear Reader,

¿What, given the conditions we know today, are some likely triggers for the transition from the capitalist system to – if successful – its higher successor system, which we call ‘Political-Economic Democracy’, and to the, first-ever, ‘Global Renaissance’, on planet Terra, that, we hold, will issue from that ‘Great Transition’?

1. Marx’s view, as written out by him in a key passage of the Grundrisse [Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Nicolaus, pp. 749-750] –

– was that the capitalist system would be ‘“given advice to be gone’’’ [would be delegitimated in the eyes of the majority class], by its regularly recurring uncontrolled crises, breaking out despite the wishes of the, otherwise powerful, capitalist ruling class, and of the rest of the, world market, population. Marx had planned to devote the final volume of his at least six treatises on his immanent critique of the political economy of the capitalist system to the topic of the “World Market and [Its] Crises”.

Marx also saw, as explicated in volume three of the first of those six treatises, entitled “Capital: A Critique of Political Economy”, that the rise of producers’ cooperatives, owned and managed by their workers, would ‘protoically’ prepare the ground for that higher successor system to the capitalist system [Karl Marx, Capital, Volume III, Part V, Chapter XXVII] –

However, after the circa 1870 to 1890 “Great Deflation” traumatically educated the capitalist ruling class on the aptness of Marx’s ‘“Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit [on Capital] to Fall”’, its ruling faction hatched a plot to defeat that “Law” which came to fruition with their imposition of the “Federal Reserve” and the Federal Income Tax in 1913, and their imposition of World War I in 1914, designed to destroy the rapidly advancing industrial productive forces of Germany and its allied nation-states.

Those institutional tools – especially the “Federal Reserve” – enabled that ruling faction to not eliminate but to weaponize capitalist economic crises; to control the onset and impact of economic crises, designing them so that the majority class bore their brunt, and to deliver advantages to that ruling faction, e.g., enabling them to buy-out the crisis-bankrupted enterprises and capital assets of rival capitalists for the proverbial “pennies on the dollar”.

2. This has led us to the consideration that capitalist-ruling-faction orchestrated economic crises, and their continual exponential inflation, via the Federal Reserve in the U.S., would, at length – as the majority class worldwide would begin to realize, albeit “groggily”, the machinations of that ruling faction, so catastrophic for that majority class – trigger a push-back by the majority class.

The 1930s push-back against the “Great Depression” wrought the Rooseveltian “New Deal” in the United States.

The Twenty-First Century’s “Great Recession” brooked a populist revolt worldwide, bringing Brexit, the ascension of the Trump faction to the U. S. Presidency twice, and the rise of the “National Rally” party in France, and the “Alternative for Germany” party in Germany, etc.

It is unclear whether these populist revolts will be able to eventuate in the ‘Great Transition’ to the higher-democratic successor system to the capitalist system.

Many of the partisans of the MAGA/MAHA movement in the United States are mired in Christianoid mysticisms, and place their allegiance to the capitalist system second only to their allegiance to the Christian God.

To see their way to the successor system of higher democracy, they would have to recognize the inherent limits of the capitalist system, specifically Marx’s realization of the capitalist system’s “Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall”. But they continually denounce “Marxism” that they only know as the Leninoid fraud, which they rightly denounce, but are, by that naming, also blocked from considering Marx’s scientific results.

The MAGA movement, and the MAGA leaders, also generally do not realize that the capitalist ruling class faction that the Trump Faction is working to defeat is, not just “greedy for wealth/power/sexual exploitation”, but ‘HUMANOCIDAL’, intent on eliminating “95%” of the human race, in order that they might stay in power. Perhaps some of the leaders know this, but are afraid to state it openly, and to campaign on it, because of what has happened to other leaders who have effectively communicated on it to the general public. My informal discussions with other majority class workers suggest that many of the base of the MAGA movement are aware of the ruling faction’s plans for enforced “population reduction”. It is the reality of Marx’s “Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall” that has, step-by-step, driven the ruling faction ultimately to this ‘humanocidal’ resolve. In their own words –

Capitalism's Fatal Flaw, and the Way Forward: 'Rocke-Nazi' Plutocracy Publicly Proclaims Planned Planetary Population Plummeting. GLOBAL STRATEGIC HYPOTHESES.

3. However, there has now – i.e., very recently, and very suddenly – loomed into view a new potential trigger for ‘The Great Transition’ – new upsurging growth in the “social forces of production” [Marx], despite the ‘Rocke-Nazi’ ruling faction’s massive efforts to stop that growth, and to reverse it: an upsurge which could, as per Marx’s fundamental principle, force a revolution in the “social relations of production”:

A. The BRICS, etc., despite the efforts of the Rocke-Nazis’ servant-dictators to create a permanent “Third World” or “Fourth World”, most of those servant-dictators have been overthrown, and the former “Third World” is rapidly industrializing, surging the growth of the “social forces of production” there again, obsoleting, and threatening with technodepreciation, much of the remaining, legacy industrial fixed capital plant and equipment in the “First World”.

B. The looming actualization of Fusion Power. Now that private entrepreneurs have taken the lead in fusion R&D, away from ‘Rocle-Nazi’-whore governments, the progress toward commercial fusion electricity generation is rapidly accelerating. The mere launching of the first commercial fusion power electric plants could tank the capital equity stock valuations of oil company capital shares, and ultimately threaten the ‘Oil Oligarchy’ and their ‘Global Dictatorship of Petroleum’ with rapid bankruptcy, financial ruin, and dethroning from global power. That Oligarchy’s desperate, draconian actions in panicked attempts to avert that ruin could trigger a reaction from the majority class that would overthrow that oligarchy, and clear the way for ‘The Great Transition’.

C. AI Android Robot Workers. The rapid development of generative AI LLM ‘software robots’, in the last few years, and the prospects that they will become the “brains” of a “physical” android robot workforce, may lead to a drastic surge in unemployment in the “First World”, among “white collar” workers even more so than “blue collar workers”. This vast robotic-fixed-capital upsurge in the “social forces of production” could force the majority class to move to implement an equally-drastic transformation in the presently-predominating “social relation of production”, i.e., in the capital-/wage-labor-relation-of-production, as a trigger driving ‘The Great Transition’. Remember what Marx noted in volume III of Capital [Capital, volume III, Part III, Chapter XV, IV. Supplementary Remarks] –

“A development of the productive forces which would diminish the absolute number of labourers, i.e., enable the entire nation to accomplish its total production in a shorter time span [M.D.: i.e., in a shorter span of aggregate human labor time], would cause a revolution, because it would put the bulk of the population out of the running.”

www.dialectics.info

and

https://independent.academia.edu/KarlSeldon

https://www.etsy.com/shop/DialecticsMATH

¡ENJOY!

Regards,

Miguel Detonacciones,

Voting Member, Foundation Encyclopedia Dialectica [F.E.D.];

Elected Member, F.E.D. General Council;

Participant, F.E.D. Special Council for Public Liaison;

Officer, F.E.D. Office of Public Liaison.

YOU are invited to post your comments on this blog-entry below!

SOLUTION –

‘Equitist Political-ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY’;

BOOK:

MARX’S MISSING BLUEPRINTS

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Thursday, April 23, 2026

The Elon Musk Singularity’ [and Equitism]. GLOBAL STRATEGIC HYPOTHESES.

‘The

Elon Musk

Singularity’

[and

Equitism].

GLOBAL STRATEGIC HYPOTHESES.

Dear Reader,

Elon Musk has stated, recently, that the extraordinary productivity of emerging android robot workers, equipped with AI minds, will be so great as to make possible, and, likely, to make necessary, for human-social survival, a society no longer based, primarily, on the social relations of social reproduction known as wagéd-labor and salaried labor.

From a non-Marxist [non-Leninoid], Marxian view, the historically rapid irruption of such robotic worker technologies constitutes, at least initially, the advent of a new, hyper-productive form of fixed capital, which, due both to its expected magnitude of productivity increase, and its historical sudden-ness of irruption, will cause a profound change in the presently-prevailing, predominant social relation of social reproduction, i.e., the capital/wage-labor relation, that is, will cause a social revolution, e.g., a ‘metafinite singularity’ that transforms the social relations of production beyond the capital-relation.

Such a social-relations revolution does not necessarily mean “blood in the streets” – an outcome more conducive to ‘“the mutual ruin of the contending classes”’ than to the self-«aufheben» transition into a new, higher successor system to the capitalist system, and to the resulting ‘Global Renaissance’, that such a transition promises. But it does mean a profound transformation of the basic social relations of our contemporary society.

Remember what Marx wrote, in Capital III, about the kind of upsurge/acceleration in the ‘societal self-reproductive self-force’ that we are just beginning to witness:

Elon Musk proposes that direct payments from governments to robotic-production-induced unemployed human former workers is the solution.

He expects that the productivity surge due to android robotics will be so colossal that the oft-cited “Guaranteed Minimum Income” reform is not what the AI-robotization of production promises.

Rather, Musk holds, it promises a “Guaranteed HIGH Income” reform.

Note, at this point, that what we call ‘The Elon Musk Singularity’, though related to, is not identical with, the earlier widely propounded, Ray Kurzweil “[Technological] Singularity”, which Kurzweil predicted will occur in 2045, as the “point” at which machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence.

In Marxian terms, by multiplying the classic Marxian profit-rate formula, s’/(c + v), by 1 in the form of ((1/v)/(1/v)), yielding –

(s’/v)/( (c/v) + 1)

– with v denoting the production-cost of wage-labor, and taking the limit of the latter expression as v à 0, we obtain the “infinities-involving”, purely-quantitative, divisions-by-zero “singularity”:

Lim_v_à₀((s’/v)/( (c/v) + 1 )) =

((s’/0)/( (c/0) + 1) ) “=” ¥/¥.

That, in Marxian terms, is ‘The Elon Musk Singularity’.

However, any “v = 0” scenario for our impending robotized economy is misleading. Even if the final stages of the production supply chain for many products were to become “fully-automated”, devoid of human workers – still a big stretch of the imagination – there will still be earlier links in that chain were some human work, at least of planning, supervision, checking and coordination, will still be required. Note also that the products of such production chains will not be costless, worth only, e.g., $0.

Even if (s’/( c + v)) becomes ‘v-less’ at many links in that chain, there will still be, e.g., materials-costs and plant/equipment “wear-and-tear” depreciation costs, c, in those links’ (s’/c) profit-rate, albeit that classic Marxian s’ would dwindle.

Even given prevalent AI-robotized production, some residual human labor costs must remain for the foreseeable future. Even if the human costs of production of the legacy c are all eventually worn out, even given robots building robots [robotic self-reproduction], and robots producing the raw materials of production and the non-android machinery of production, etc., for the reasons given above, v will not reach absolute 0: no “singularity” involving “infinite” quantities will arise. But a ‘metafinite socio-political-economic singularity’ will arise from such a degree of robotization of social production.

We think that Elon Musk’s ‘“direct payments from government to robotically-unemployed citizens”’ needs to be institutionalized, as a constitutional human right and property right.

We think that the Seldonian model of ‘Equitist Political-ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY’ provides a direct way to do accomplish that, via the interconnection of two of its three new, key All-Citizen Equities – ‘Citizen Birthright Equities’ and ‘Citizen Stewardship Equities’.

The ‘Citizen Birthright Equity’ Social Trust Funds could be set up so as to deliver ‘‘‘dividends’’’, e.g., monthly, to, at least, on an emergency basis, all robotically-unemployed Citizens, as a result of their ‘Birthright Equity’ equal ‘‘‘shares’’’ in socialized production. Initially, this would mean equity-stock shares in the “public sector” of socialized production’s profits, while the ‘Citizen Stewardship Equity’ sector of socialized production is still in its infancy.

‘Citizen Stewardship Equity socialized producers’ cooperatives’ are formed when qualifying ‘Citizen Stewards’ Collectives’ are granted means of production to fulfill their underwritten business plans, by their underwriting, competing Social Bank(s), in return for a monthly ‘Social Rent’ on those social-property means of production, paid from their earnings in market competition with other ‘Stewardship Cooperatives’ in their field, and with remaining capital-equity enterprises in their field.

Given the expansion of that new, ‘Stewardship Equity’, ‘socialized producers’ cooperatives’ sector of the economy, the ‘Citizen Birthright Equity Shares’ dividends would increasingly be paid to Citizens from out of the ‘Stewardship Equity’ sector’s ‘Social Rents’.