this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
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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