this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
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In Capitalism in the Web of Life, Jason D. Moore posits that the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is really a manifestation of the tendency of the ecological surplus to decline. He lays out how the organization of society-and-nature (they are the same thing btw) creates limits to available ecological surplus, and new technological and social innovations enable weakening modes of organization to break into new frontiers of ecological capitalization. Each of these successive reorganizations (think: mercantilism, settler-colonialsm, fossil industrialism, monopoly imperialism, financialization, etc) more and more quickly burn through the ecological surplus available to them. This is the cause of cyclical capitalist crises, as cheap food, fuel, labor, and nature are chewed up in hungrier and hungrier systems with shorter lifespans than their predecessors. Pure digital financialization is the current desperate effort to wring profit out of a situation where natural surplus is at an all time low and human demand is at an all time high.
Leaving this comment as a bookmark. My initial thought is no, the tendency for the rate of profit to fall can be derived without any reference whatever to natural resource availability. The root cause of capitalist crisis is a contradiction: capitalism compels producers to minimize labor (and resource!) inputs in order to maximize value. The ideal end of this would be a kind of singularity in which value can be produced without labor. Contradiction.
Another thought is that value is strictly non-physical, although it is embodied in physical commodities. Andrew Kliman has argued at length against what he calls a “physical quantities” or physicalist interpretation of value theory.
The same wool coat can be worth 1 hour or 10 hours (in monetary terms, say $10 or $100) depending on the development of the industry at the time. The thing that is constant, independent of all changes in productivity, is that 1 working day contains 1 working day. It may be split up among varying physical quantities, but the value produced per day is essentially constant.
I very strongly recommend reading the book, as my representation is incredibly oversimplified. It's some serious heavy-duty Marxist theory and I think it's brilliant.
I’ll def check it out