Seldon
on
‘Capitalism’s Fatal Flaw’.
-- Part 09: Quoting
Seldon Series.
GLOBAL STRATEGIC HYPOTHESES.
Dear Reader,
It
is my pleasure,
and my honor, as an elected member
of the Foundation Encyclopedia
Dialectica [F.E.D.] General Council, and as a voting member of F.E.D., to share, with you, from time to time, as they are approved for public release by the F.E.D. General Council, key excerpts from the internal writings, and from the internal sayings, of our co-founder,
Karl Seldon.
This 9th release of
this new such
series is posted below
[Some E.D.
standard edits have been applied, in the version presented below, by the editors
of the F.E.D. Special Council for the Encyclopedia,
to the direct transcript of our co-founder’s
discourse].
In this 9th installment, Seldon narrates the ‘intra-duality’ of “the capital-relation”
[Marx] as predominant human-social relation of human-societal self-re-production,
and as the predominating paradigm of an only semi-conscious human-societal self-reproductive
praxis, during the capitalist epoch, a ’self-duality’ which pre-determines its
demise, but not the form of that demise – e.g., ‘Global
Renaissance’ versus ‘New/Final Dark Age’: ‘‘‘the mutual ruin of the contending
classes.’’’ [cf. Communist Manifesto].
Seldon
does so in a way which both illuminates and critically extends
Marx’s “law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall”, as the key to the predicted
self-caused demise of the capitalist system.
Marx
emphasizes the “capital as self-expanding value” side of
the ‘intra-duality’ of capital, e.g., capital-value expansion via the re-investment
of parts of profits into new industrial fixed-capital means of production.
However,
in Seldon’s view, Marx under-emphasizes the ‘capital as self-contracting
value’ side of that ‘intra-duality’ – the very side which is the key to Marx’s “law
of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall” in its full, more concrete, “competition
of capitals” context – a context which Marx did not live long enough to theorize
and to systematically present.
It
is the full exposition of this “contradiction” between capital as “self-expanding
value” [Marx] and capital as ‘self-contracting value’
[Seldon], which makes clear how Marx’s general, generic
formulation of the dialectical ‘meta-dynamic’ driving
human-social ‘meta-evolution’ – as driven by the growth
of the “social forces of production”, a growth which capitalism especially
promotes, far more than all previous modes of human-societal self-re-production
– applies historically-specifically to the specifically
capitalist mode of human-societal self-re-production.
Once,
in the course of the accumulation of capital as “self-expanding value”, the aggregate
industrial fixed-capital-value component of total accumulated capital-value
crosses a certain percentage threshold, accumulated fixed capital-value then tends
to become fatally vulnerable to further increments in the growth
of “the social forces of production”.
It
does so because, in the context of the competition of industrial capitals -- when
the historical, original value of the obsolescent fixed capital value is
forced, by competition, to be “written off” against [subtracted from]
current gross profits – resulting net profits, and hence the rate of those profits,
tend to be decremented by far more than the acquiring and installing
of the new, more productive fixed capital tends to increment those
same net profits, by virtue of the more advanced capital equipments’ increased productivity/lowering
of unit costs of production of their output; of commodities for sale.
Seldon –
“Marx’s
Historically-Specific “Law” of Capitalism’s Rise and Fall – “The Law of the
Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall” – critically revised and extended.”
“The “growth of the social forces of production” [Marx] means the growth
of the goods-[and-services-]productivity of human labor, and hence
also growth of the ‘onto-mass’ of human society; growth of human ‘socio-mass’ ‘self-productivity’,
and growth of ‘the human-societal self-re-productive self-force of the human
species’, which results in a generally accelerating expansion of human-societal
self-reproduction, and thus in a rise in the human-phenomic/human-genomic
‘meta-Darwinian fitness’ of the human species.”
“According
to Marx, this growth in the rate of human-societal self-reproduction is the
historically-generic driver by which the social evolution
of human social formations at length spills-over into their social ‘meta-evolution’/
“social revolution”, as the constitution of a new, higher
social formation and historic epoch, founded upon a new, higher predominant social
relation of production, one which is premised upon, and expandedly reproduces,
a higher human-societal reproduction rate [i.e., upon a higher ‘meta-Darwinian
fitness’.]:
“… . At a certain stage of their development the material forces of production
in society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or –
what is but a legal expression for the same thing – with the property relations
within which they had been at work before.”
“From forms
of the development of the forces of production these relations turn into their
fetters.”
“Then comes
the period of social revolution. …”
“The bourgeois
[KS: capitalist] relations of production [create] the last antagonistic form of the
social process of production [KS: hence also of the process of human-societal
self-re-production]” – antagonistic not in the sense
of individual antagonism, but of [KS: an antagonism] arising from conditions surrounding the life of individuals in
society; at the same time the productive forces developing in the womb of
bourgeois [KS: capitalist] society create the material conditions for the solution of that
antagonism.”
“This
social formation constitutes, therefore, the closing chapter of the prehistoric
stage of human society.”
[from the Preface to: Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique
of Political Economy, 1859, translated in Lewis Feuer, ed., Marx
& Engels Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy.]
“But how
does Marx’s generic account of what we call ‘human-social meta-evolution’,
above, apply specifically to the epoch of the evolution of capitalist
society?”
How does the
accelerated growth of the social forces of production, fostered by the industrial-capitalist
social relation of production itself, bring about the demise of the capitalist
social relation of production itself?”
“Under the
rule of capital, of the capital/wage-labor social relation of production as
predominant human-social relation of production, in its industrial-capitalist
stage, the growth of the social forces of production that this social relation
of production – the “capital-relation” [Marx] – initially “hot-house” fosters;
which the competition of capitals itself drives and ‘incentivizes’, lowers the
reproduction costs, and also, typically, the operating costs, of new, innovative
vintages of industrial fixed capital plant and equipment.”
“This destroys
the capital-value, the monetary value, of the thus-made technologically-
obsolescent, competitively-obsolescent older vintages of industrial fixed capital
plant and equipment.”
“The obsolescent
fixed capital plant and equipment can no longer be used, must be scrapped,
despite any debt-service still due on the, e.g., 50-year bank loans by which it
was acquired. Thus, this fixed-capital’s
total original cost must be “charged-off” – subtracted from – current gross
profits, thus lowering net profits.”
“Or, if it
is still to be used in production, its original capital-value must be written-down,
to a lower-value, with the resulting value-loss again subtracted from current
gross profits.”
“The
continual writing down/charging-off and scrapping of ever more physical legacy
fixed capital plant and equipment, and of its capital-value, reducing net
profits, while accelerating industrial-capitalist means-of-production
innovation -- productive-force growth – escalates, initially drives a secular
fall in the rate of profit, or rate of return on investment, for industrial fixed
capital plant and equipment investments, for competing individual industrial
capitals, and for banks whose capital equipment loans may never be repaid, e.g.,
if a bank-loan-backed industrial capital goes bankrupt due to the competition from
competing industrial capitals fielding lower cost and/or more-productive industrial
fixed capital plant and equipment.”
“This
secular fall in profitability, concomitant with a fall in the prices of machine-produced
commodities across the board, manifested with particular force in the ~1870 to ~1890
“Great Deflation” – with such force that it, we conjecture, woke up the core of
the industrial and banking capitalist ruling class to their “immanent and
imminent peril”, due to the dynamics of “their own” system itself.”
“The most-concentrated
capital-ownership stratum of the capitalist ruling class – the most vulnerable
to this productive-force-growth-induced ‘self-de-value-ation’ of
capital-value, and its consequent profit-rate fall, due to the accelerating technological
obsolescence depreciation, or ‘techno-depreciation’, of their gargantuan industrial
fixed capital plant and equipment accumulations, with their
competition-enforced write-downs or charge-offs and scrappings of that fixed
capital – reacts violently to these growing losses to their accumulated
capital-value and its profitability.”
“They fund
the manufacture and propagation of, at first, new ideologies of “Social Darwinism”
and of “Eugenics”, culminating in the “eugenics”, genocidal/ethnic-exterminationist
regime of Hitler, their ‘Servant-Dictator’, turned ‘Franken-Dictator’, and the
global holocaust of World War II, and later, of new, anti-science,
anti-technology ideologies of neo-mysticism and of Malthusian, “ecological”, “zero
[i.e., negative] population growth”, “zero [i.e., negative] economic growth”, “small
is beautiful”, etc., to “justify” their attacks against further growth of the
social forces of production/social productivity.”
“It is the
global policy reaction of the capitalist ruling class’s ruling
faction to the growing predominance of capital as ‘self-contracting value’ due
to productive-force-growth-induced ‘technodepreciation’, that creates the ‘descendence
phase’ of the global capitalist system.”
“It is not
just the crossing of the threshold of the fixed-capital
composition of total capital whereafter ‘self-contracting value’ overcomes ‘self-expanding
value’, together with the accelerating progress in means of
production technological innovation/productive force growth that precipitates
that ‘descendence phase’ by itself.”
“The
capitalist system, like any human-social system, is not a – ‘psyche-less’ –
mechanical system. It is a system
permeated at every turn with human psyches:
it is a ‘‘‘psychohistorical’’’ system.”
“One can
thought-experiment about a capitalist system with a higher ethical culture than
ours, one with resistance to ‘the power sickness’ – the tendency of power to
corrupt, tending asymptotically toward absolute corruption by absolute
power – such that the most-concentrated capital-ownership faction of the
capitalist ruling class would not seek to hold on to their power
at any human cost – at the cost of destroying humanity itself.”
“In such a
scenario, the capitalist ruling class would experience accelerating turnover,
and continual refreshment in terms of its “personnel” composition, with former
dominant players displaced and dethroned by newer, upstart capitalists,
wielding higher productive force means of production, and/or founding new
industries, based upon new kinds of products.”
“The –
problematic, and decidedly still capitalist -- contemporaneous story of Elon
Musk instantiates some aspects of this thought-experimental scenario: a kind of
miniature, temporary rekindling of some aspects of the ‘ascendence phase’ of the
capitalist epoch – the rapid expansion of new industrial production facilities,
for new kinds of products, e.g., in the automobile, battery, rocketry, satellite
communication network, and tunneling industries, and in other industries, with
a rapid escalation in the capital-value “net worth” of Mr. Musk, the capitalist
leading these innovations.”
“And just
look at how the ruling-faction “owned” mass media, and ruling-faction “owned”
agencies of the Federal Government, continually attack everything that Mr. Musk
says and does, 24/7!”
“The “descendence-phase’
capitalist ruling class ruling faction has very little tolerance for any re-assertion
of capitalist ‘ascendence-phase’, pro-progress ideologies, practices, and
values. ... .”
In 1913,
the ‘descendence-phase’ ruling faction mounted a concerted offensive
against the majority class, e.g., to foist their costs of ‘technodepreciation’ onto
the majority class, in the form of the Federal Reserve and Federal Income Tax
legislations in the U.S.”
“A key
purpose of the “Federal Reserve”, for the ruling faction of the capitalist
ruling class, was to shore-up profits, by imposing a ‘controlled
hyper-inflation’, whereby the real wages of the majority class where
continually falling, leaving more real value in the hands of the capitalists.”
“A key
purpose of the Federal Income Tax, none of whose proceeds were to
go to the majority class [until ‘the Roosevelt faction’
became, temporarily, predominant], who paid
most of those taxes, was to fund the creation of a “Third World”.”
“At the
time, many countries peripheral to the capitalist core – the core then
consisting of the U.S., the U.K., and France – e.g., the “semi-peripheral”
countries of Argentina, Russia, India, and Japan – where showing signs of rapid
industrialization.”
“Such
industrialization would pose a major threat of technodepreciation losses to the
concentrated capital and profits “owned” by that ruling faction.”
“This is
because newly industrializing countries might enjoy the latest in
technologically-advanced capital equipment – skipping the obsolescent legacy
vintages of such equipment – combined with initially far-lower wages than were
being paid by the ruling faction.”
“These new “upstarts”
could easily undersell the ruling faction’s output on the world market, while
still pocketing large profits, and enjoying a high rate of profit – a high rate
of return on their industrial investments.
This is, in part, because the general increase of the “productive forces”
includes higher productivity in the production of the newer means of
production, thus a lower price for that newer equipment than was paid for the
less-productively-produced, older, legacy vintages of the now-obsolescent
capital equipment.”
“Remember
how the post-World-War-II renascent Japanese auto industry devastated the U.S.
auto industry, by producing lower-priced, better automobiles?”
“The ruling
faction planned to use the proceeds of the new U.S. income taxes to arm, and to
place in power, ‘servant-dictators’ in those countries of the periphery where
capitalist industrialization was underway – servants to the ruling
faction, which funded them, placed them in power, and kept them in power, even to
the point using U.S. military forces, by invading their countries “if necessary”;
brutal, productive-forces-suppressing, progress-reversing dictators
to their own people.”
“The ruling
faction’s regime of military dictatorships -- in what became, thereby, a “Third
World” of deepening impoverishment for the majority class there -- worked “successfully”,
to suppress industrialization there, to suppress capitalist development there,
and to block the growth of the social forces of production there, for a
time.”
“However,
by the 1990s, many of the ruling faction’s ‘servant-dictatorships’ had been
overthrown, or weakened.”
“In the
BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – rapid industrialization
resumed.”
“Thereafter,
seemingly the whole of humanity – much of it more educated, more skilled, more
innovative than ever before – was threatening to ‘technodepreciate’ the
ruling faction’s capital assets.”
“That ruling
faction still could, and did, score a massive “hit” on the U.S. majority class,
by moving much of their capital equipment from the U.S. to the newly-industrializing,
lower-wage nations of their former “Third World”, leaving U.S. workers, by the
thousands, to flip burgers, die early of homelessness, and/or assuage their pain
with opioids, e.g., via fatal doses of fentanyl.”
“However, this
destruction of the U.S., U.K., etc., majority classes did not suffice for the
ruling faction.”
“To take one
example as to why: The ruling oligarchs couldn’t
know, from day to day, whether, e.g., a Chinese engineer, educated in a U.S.
university, and working in her garage, might discover, e.g., a successful “polywell”
approach to nuclear fusion, making mere water a far more power fuel than
petroleum, and collapsing the capital equity stock value of the ruling faction’s
“flagship” global petroleum capital assets by a huge percentage, overnight,
once the “polywell” reactor discovery hit the news.”
“. . .”
“Ultimately,
by now, this ruling faction of the capitalist ruling class has morphed their
earlier, Malthusian, Social Darwinist, “Eugenicist”, and “ecology” ideologies
into a “People Are Pollution”, ‘humanocidal’, “Global Warming” Austerity, omni-ethnic,
omni-genocidal, designer-pandemic, exterminationist strategy, attacking the
very heart of the “social forces of production” -- the global human population
itself -- aiming at an extermination of “95%” of the global human
population –
See the public
statements of this goal, by ‘spokes-servants’ of that ruling faction, via the
following URL:
Capitalism's
Fatal Flaw, and the Way Forward: Plutocracy Publicly Proclaims Planned
Planetary Population Plummeting. GLOBAL STRATEGIC HYPOTHESES.
(capitalismsfundamentalflaw-wayforward.blogspot.com)”
“If this
ruling faction succeeds in their plans for global human population extermination,
they will virtually assure the total extinction of the Terran human species – a
prospect which the “Doctor Strangeloves” of this hyper-demented and hyper-delusional
ruling faction are far too narcissistically and ‘sociopath-ically’ blinded to
foresee, in the midst of their atavistic fantasies of a “permanent”, '''Orwellian''', neo-feudal
order, which they would rule as an absolutist autocracy.”
[M.D.:] The
above assertions constitute key and inter-integrated hypotheses of what we call M.O.S.T., the ‘Marx-Orwell-Seldon
Theory of the capitalist epoch.
For more
about the ‘technodepreciation’ theory of “the law of the tendency of the rate
of profit to fall”, see –
Capitalism's
Fatal Flaw, and the Way Forward: Explicit Discussion of Falling
Return-on-Capital Rates among Lower Layers of the Capitalist Plutocracy.
(capitalismsfundamentalflaw-wayforward.blogspot.com)
Capitalism's
Fatal Flaw, and the Way Forward: Thorstein Veblen's Version of Marx's "Law
of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall". A Commentary.
(capitalismsfundamentalflaw-wayforward.blogspot.com)
For more
information regarding these
Seldonian insights, please see --
www.dialectics.info
For partially pictographical, ‘poster-ized’ visualizations of many of these Seldonian insights -- specimens of ‘dialectical art’ – as well as dialectically-illustrated books
by the F.E.D. Press, see --
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.
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