>>513226843
>It’s often said that capitalism is about producing goods for society, but a deeper look reveals something else entirely: it's fundamentally about extracting surplus value from labor.
Again with these high level abstractions.
It's not this complicated.
1. Financial profits come from money printing or from reducing costs.
2. This requires that the money supply grow geometrically perpetually.
3. Ever accelerating creation of money causes inflation, even if real productivity (of actual real things made in the real world) increases because productivity can never increase as fast as the money supply needs to increase simply for capitalism to continue operating.
4. The inflation affects all prices in the economy, further exacerbating the pressure to cut costs.
5. The pressure to cut costs caused by the ever present and accelerating inflation leads to shrinkflation and enshittification as well as outsourcing of production abroad to get it away from the glut of domestic fiat currency.
6. This leads to deindustrialisation and reliance on imports.
7. This destroys the war making potential of the capitalist country in the long run.
>The current crisis, often described as a "shrinking surplus value,"
I don't deal in high level abstractions or weasel words such as "value".
>It simply means that capitalists can no longer generate the same level of profit
All that capitalists need in order to generate financial profit is banks. Nothing else is required.
>from a given amount of production.
Financial profit does not require production. See Iceland.
>This is an inherent contradiction within the system.
Yes. The real economy versus capitalism. Capitalism wins every time.
>The Western armaments industry is a prime example of this "anti-economic" character. Profits don't come from meeting real needs;
They come from creation of mostly fictional fiat currency and from cutting costs, such as by enshittification, shrinkflation and moving production abroad to escape inflation.