Cowbee [he/they]

Pretty much! You’d even see some coops dominate others more directly, like collective worker-owners employing collective worker-owners in wage labor similar to what goes on individually in regular firms.

Sort of, not quite. The TRPF is closer to saying “if Capitalists continue to automate and improve production, ie if c/v increases, ie if the organic composition of capital increases, then the rate of profit will fall unless exploitation, ie s/v, increases.”

s/v can be increased in a number of ways, from increasing intensity, to Imperialism, ie using far more brutal exploitation in foreign countries.

Climate Change is similar in that the TRPF is a tendency, and temperature vaires on a daily basis, but the key difference is that while the TRPF does exist, ways of countering it temporarily also exist, while Climate Change isn’t “countered” when it gets colder for a day. It’s similar, but I wanted to point it out.

Also, absolute profits and the rate of profit are different, absolute profits have been rising, and rise most by producing and selling more. This is why c/v must rise in Capitalism, you can’t just keep stagnating.

Pre-Marx Socialists following Robert Owen. Owen was a Utopian, ie a “model builder.” He believed that it was the task of great thinkers to create a perfect society in their heads, and bring it about in reality. This is the wrong approach, which Marx and Engels spent a good amount of time countering.

What you have described is the pure moment of input costs lowering (and you’re confusing surplus value with price, 50 being surplus would also imply 10 in variable and 10 in constant, so 70 would be the input for company 2 if you simplify for the sake of example absolutely no tool usage in company 2). However, unless company 2 has a pure monopoly on chairs, this lowering of cost of production would also apply to other chair companies, and costs would lower. When wood prices are low, wooden chairs cost less than when wood prices are higher.

Further, the TRPF isn’t really about competition, or even surplus value. That’s one-sided. The TRPF is about rising organic composition of Capital, ie as c increases in ratio with v, or c/v. Competition pushes for this, as increasing automation can allow temporary advantage (as you’ve somewhat shown) before other companies follow suit. What you’ve shown is one company lowering the ratio of c/v, ie lowering the costs of their constant Capital over their variable, but that would imply that this company should never reduce wages nor increase automation as a rule.

In order to outcompete, constant Capital must rise in ratio, as it can lower prices of production below what others can offer, even though this raises c/v. Hence total profits rise, but rates of profit trend downwards.

Your argument would only hold true if this was the final part of the process and competition didn’t exist for company 2, allowing them to charge monopoly prices and never worry about increasing automation and productivity.

Now, the rate of profit falling is often wholly combatted by increasing exploitation, or e=s/v. This, however, gives rise to stagnating real wages while the Capitalists get ever wealthier, sharpening class contradictions.

There would be what we would consider a “government” in Communism, just not a “state,” ie heavily militarized police to resolve class contradictions in the favor of whoever controls the state, the workers or the Capitalists. Anarchists want full horizontalism, Marxists want full public ownership.

The people who control the government in Capitalism is the Capitalists, the people who control the government in Socialism is the working class, and the people who control the government in Communism is the people. That’s the point of Communism.

Wanting an economy run democratically by all of society for all of society, rather than have an economy made up of small competing cells that each want to further their own interests at the expense of others, is a reasonable thing. “Domination” has nothing to do with it.

No problem!

If it costs 5 dollars to make one widget on average, and company A creates a machine that improves production so as to lower the cost of widgets produced by them to 3 dollars, then they temporarily make more profit until other companies that make widgets find ways to lower their cost of production to around the same level. This new lower price has a higher ratio of value advanced from machinery as compared to labor, lowering the rate of profit. This is a general tendency, but can be fought against by many measures, including monopolization and using regulations to prevent companies from properly conpeting, ie by copyrighting machinery and production processes.

Imperialism didn’t just allow for expansion, it also came with violent means of suppressing wages and extracting super-profits. It wasn’t just an expansion that would raise total profitd while rate of profits fell, it also created new avenues for exploiting labor even more intensely, and selling goods domestically at marked up prices.

Really, I don’t know what your issue with the TRPF is, are you under the assumption that Marxists claim it’s an ironclad law over time and not a tendency, or are you against the Law of Value in general?

It’s a tendency, not an ironclad law. Competition forces prices down, and rates of profit with it, but this process can be struggled against by expanding markets or finding new industries, which is why Capital always pours into “new fads” in the short term. Imperialism is actually quite a huge driver of this.

There are numerous studies showing broad rates of profit falling over time, as well. Moreover, Marx never lived to see Imperialism as it developed in the early 20th century, where the TRPF was countered most firmly.

Cooperatives are petite-bourgeois structures. They are small cells of worker-owners that only own their small cell, and exclude its ownership from society as a whole. Since cooperatives exist only in the context of the broader economy, they form small cells of private property aimed at improving their own standing at the expense of others.

Think of it this way, a worker in coop A has fundamentally different property relations to the Capital owned by coop A than worker B does in coop A. This creates a society of petite bourgeois worker-owners, not a classless society of equal ownership of all amongst all.

Capitalism compels firms to grow or die, in order to fight the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. We’d need to move beyond a profit-driven economy to move beyond this issue.

We gotta do it, so it helps to be optimistic!

This is both rude and ahistorical, laws are passed based on what the ruling class wants. The ruling class cannot abide Socialism unless the Proletariat becomes the ruling class through revolution.

Watch your rudeness if you are going to be confidently incorrect.

This is generally wrong. Marx and Engels believed Capitalism itself prepares the foundations for Socialism, but not that revolution had to wait for Capitalism to fully develop to succeed. Socialist governments can oversee economies and build towards Communism without needing to be fully developed Capitalist states before the revolution. As a result, Marx and Engels would support historical Communist movements like Cuba, the USSR, PRC, etc, especially if they had lived to see Capitalism turn to Imperialism, shifting revolutionary pressure from the most developed countries to the most Imperialized countries.

No problem!

No problem! I live in the US Empire, hopefully the age of Imperialism is coming to a close. Contradictions are sharpening, eventually quantitative buildup will result in a qualitative and rapid change, and it’s up to the working class to make that a positive one.

Glad the figure was useful!

To even get there in the first place requires making several nearly impossible leaps. If such a thing could happen, it may be able to form something like that, but given that it would be a profit-driven firm it’s more likely that it would lose its cooperative character without a proletarian state over it to enforce that. More than likely, it would go the same way the Owenites went, moderate success at first before fizzling out and failing to overcome the Capitalist system.

No worries! I’ve been less active lately so it might be a while before I see any response anyways.

Not sure about a post comparing the two, but the Soviet model was more comprehensively democratic, and functioned like this: