Capitalism's Fatal Flaw, and the Way Forward: Why the “Collision” that Marx Describes between Capitalist Production and the Productive Forces is a SELF-Collision.

Sunday, February 15, 2026

Why the “Collision” that Marx Describes between Capitalist Production and the Productive Forces is a SELF-Collision.

Why the

“Collision” that

Marx Describes

between

Capitalist Production

and

the Productive Forces

is a

SELF-Collision.

Dear Reader,

Marx wrote the following in the section, of the third volume of Capital, on “The Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall”*:

“…capitalist production is by no means an absolute form for the development of the productive forces and for the creation of wealth, but rather…at a certain point it comes into collision with this development.”

The collision that Marx describes in the passage above is, we wish to emphasize, a self-collision.

This is so, because the capital social relation of production’s system itself, its “capitalist mode of production” – what we call its ‘mode of [human-societal self-re-]production’ – in its core motive, the “profit motive”, drives it, via “the competition of capitals”, to internally grow/develop the social forces of [human-societal self-re-] production’, by competing individual capital owners, in pursuit of profit-advantages via the expansion of “relative surplus-value”.

Marx also calls this “collision” a [self- or internal or immanent] “contradiction”, and describes how the capitalist system “…moves thus in a contradiction”.

We prefer – so as to avoid analogizing dialectical, societal ‘self-dualities’ to propositional mutual negations – an ‘intra-contra-kinesis’, one that is immanent to, i.e., inherent in, the [industrial-] capital/wage-labor social relation of production, as predominant social relation of production.

Furthermore, we expect that this ‘intra-contra-kinesis’ can be effectively «aufheben»-contained/constrained and resolved within a new and higher predominant ‘social relation of societal self-re-production’, namely that of ‘Generalized Equity’, or of ‘Equitist Political-ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY’, as outlined below.

*[See Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, Book III, Part III, The Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall, pp. 263-264 in the 1967 New World paperback edition].

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: