Capitalism's Fatal Flaw, and the Way Forward: The Propositional ‘‘‘Self-Contradiction’’’ that IS CAPITAL and Capitalism’s Fatal Flaw. GLOBAL STRATEGIC HYPOTHESES.

Thursday, September 10, 2026

The Propositional ‘‘‘Self-Contradiction’’’ that IS CAPITAL and Capitalism’s Fatal Flaw. GLOBAL STRATEGIC HYPOTHESES.

The

Propositional

‘‘‘Self-

Contradiction’’’

that IS
CAPITAL

and

Capitalism’s

Fatal

Flaw.

GLOBAL STRATEGIC HYPOTHESES.

Dear Reader,

The capital social-praxis, and the partly propositionally-motivated, beliefs-motivated behavior of capitalists, can be grasped as a kind of, ‘antinomious’-looking, propositional contradiction.

1. CAPITAL-PROPOSITION [that capitalists believe, and act upon] –

“Increase productivity [“productive force”] and your rate of profit will rise.”

2. COUNTER-PROPOSITION [via Marx’s Immanent critique] –

“Increase productivity [“productive force”] and your rate of profit will fall.”

[The revelatory proposition revealed by Marx’s three volumes of Capital, culminating in volume III’s “Law of the Tendency of the General Rate of Profit to Fall”].

3. ‘UNI-PROPOSITION’ [also via Marx’s immanent critique] –

Critique-corrected/unified proposition:

Increasing the productivity of your industrial operation will make your rate of profit RISE, in the short-run, transiently, by increasing your operation’s production of relative surplus-value,

and,

increasing the productivity of your industrial operation will make your rate of profit FALL, in the long-run, by increasing your operation’s exposure to recurring techno-depreciations.

Explication. Soon, in the context of a competitive, industrial capitalist [world-]market, competing capitalists will match or exceed your productivity-raising technologies. Thus, your productivity gains, and those of your competitors, will eventually accumulate fixed capital value as the predominate or major component of the entire capital-value that you own. That ‘primarity’ of fixed capital will increase your vulnerability to what comes next.

The [e.g., world-market-]competition-driven, profit-motive-driven, all-sided increase in productivity [i.e., in “productive force”], hence in the mass, and, to a lesser extent, in the capital-value, of the competing industrial capitalists’ fixed capital machinery, will lead to ongoing, and accelerating, competition-imposed technological obsolescence depreciation of fixed capital-value, before it can even be amortized via the sum of “wear-and-tear” depreciation charges incorporated into the prices of that fixed-capital’s output over time.

Scrapping and replacing obsoleted capital plant and equipment, subtracting its remaining, unamortized value from gross profits, while still paying on, e.g., 30-year loans that purchased that now crapped machinery, that is thus no longer earning anything toward those remaining years of continuing, e.g., monthly, debt-service payments, and taking out new debt to finance the purchase of the replacement machinery, and having to so accounting-period-after-accounting-period, with rising frequency, as ‘equipmental’ technological advancement accelerates, will drive down the rates of profit of industrial capitalists.

It will drive down, toward bankruptcy and investment-crisis, especially those capitals in the legacy territorial zones of industrial capitalism, confronted by competition from new industries in the zones of later/recent industrial capitalist development, where the most advanced equipment may be installed first, and where wage levels may be initially lower than in the legacy-capitalist zones.

‘Productive-force-growth’s tendency of the rate of profit to rise, in the short-run, while the fixed-capital composition of total capital is low, and the rate of fixed capital advancement is still slow [capital’s ‘ascendence phase’], gives way to productive-force-growth’s tendency of the rate of profit to fall, as fixed capital becomes preponderant in the composition of industrial capital, and as the rate of fixed capital productivity-advancement accelerates [capital’s ‘descendence phase’].

This transition of industrial capitalism, of its capital social-praxis, starting out as a “form of development” of societal reproductive force, and ending as a “fetter” on societal reproductive force, is a manifestation of the ineluctable ‘intra-duality’ of the “industrial capital-relation” [Marx], i.e., of the “wage-labor-relation”, when it is the predominant social relation of societal self-re-production –

Capital as “self-expanding value” # Capital as ‘self-contracting value’

– the former side via re-investment and accumulation of profits, the latter side via productive-force-increase-driven devaluation of accumulated fixed-capital value, the periodic lost value then subtracted from periodic profits.

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 –