F.E.D. Dialectics: Seldon on ‘Capitalism’s Fatal Flaw’. -- Part 9: Quoting Seldon Series.

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 --