capitalism

The progressive role of capitalism

Unlike previous modes of production like slavery or feudalism, capitalists buy the labour power of workers, where competition then forces them to get as much out of the worker as they can. It gives the capitalists an incentive to invest into that worker to make them more productive / more skilled, but also to intensify their labor, to get more profit out of them, as well as reducing the cost of their labor, so they can produce below the socially neccessary labour time. It creates this drive to invest into machinery and automation, to increase the productivity, aka increase the amount of use-value that is produced in a given unit of labor time → rapid development of the productive forces in the golden age of capitalism.
→ This is also why today, technology is feared and not viewed as something progressive: People understand that technology is not introduced for our benefit, but for capitalist profits.
The internal contradictions within these progressive forces of capitalism pile up and turn into their opposite.
One such contradiction manifests in the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall.

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Building Blocks of capitalism

1. commodity production (explore this note recursively from here on out to discover the rest of marxist economics, lol)
2. private property
3. nation state

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Capitalism and competition are antonyms. A capitalist is someone in the business of accumulating capital. A world of perfect competition is a world where all the profits are competed away. - Peter Thiel

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The dynamics of capital accumulation

• Tendency toward monopoly (network effects, economies of scale)
• Recurrent crises (overproduction, financial bubbles)
• Environmental externalization (costs pushed outside the system boundary)
• Increasing complexity/fragility (supply chains optimized for efficiency, not resilience)

The system is dissipative, maintained far from equilibrium by continuous throughput of energy and labor. It’s “stable” in the sense of returning to its accumulation logic after crises, but the crises get bigger and the contradictions accumulate.

Capitalism means war.

Markets and opportunities for investments have been shrinking since 2008 - capitalism outgrew itself and is now suffocating under the constraints of the nation state/national markets and private property.
The relative decline of US-imperialism accelerates this process. It is no longer able to prevent its competitors from gaining influence on a regional level - and its allies also understood that they can now only rely on their own military power to defend their interests, which is why we have seen a massive rise in military spending in Europe and the pacific.

Circular transclusion detected: general/marxist-economics

Capitalism and Science

Capitalism does not make halt before the cultural or scientific world - It tries to put a common mindset into the masses, which is aligned to the establishment. Captial has an interest to cannibalise the will of the lower classes into supporting capitalism, which is reflected also in the scientific / academic community.
The profit economy transforms every research institute into a factory with its publish or perish mentality.
→ Loads and loads of pointless papers. The same work over and over again without any innovation.

Transclude of reason-in-revolt#^79e056

People in the scientific community are extremely overworked, and forced to sell their labour power for really cheap, … The work for an endeavor of new knowledge turns into a work for survival, as academia is turned into a factory.
In an attempt to survive, the try to abide by the system’s rules. Try to follow what other researchers or companies push (see e.g. LLM craze, Quantum (without any actual breakthroughs), …).
Companies decide what research to pursue. Science, education, art, … are not free under capitalism.