The falling rate of profit

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neoliberals, everybody

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This seems like a natural conclusion to me too. The tendency for the rate of profit to fall is based on some pretty big assumptions. It is true to a degree, but I think a lot of leftists misinterpret it as leading to a zero profit situation in which capitalism begins to unravel, but this doesn’t seem reasonable or likely at all. We have seen that as capital accumulates there is a tendency for price collusion at the top to occur. Large companies increasingly feud over brand identities and use marketing to win customers, they don’t feud over prices or production. There is an increasing disincentive to reinvest in production, because the returns on it are decreasing with the level of development and capitalists know this. They do attempt to imiserate the working class more in search of a higher return, that is true, but it seems as though it is possible for the expected rate of return for capitalists to adjust to a very low level, as long as they are already powerful and rich. That is what they covet most, not necessarily to watch their amounts of currency rise by leaps and bounds forever. They’re like any other powerful class in history, the moment the game of accumulation slows to a crawl they’ll simply assert their right to stay at the top and continue playing status games.

Quite. Which is why we can't just sit and wait for the "contradictions in capitalism to cause it to collapse" or some such. That just recycled eschatology.

marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch14.htm

Yeah, no shit, but it's actually deeper than that.
marxisthumanistinitiative.org/economic-crisis/brexit-trumpism-sanders-and-the-decrepit-state-of-capitalism-against-political-determinism-2.html
marxisthumanistinitiative.org/resistance-to-trumpism-2/against-left-economic-populism.html
marxisthumanistinitiative.org/economic-crisis/appearance-and-essence-neoliberalism-financialization-and-the-underlying-crisis-of-capitalist-production.html

Not unreasonable, but keep in mind that the core countries in that graph have been replacing their own profits with the profits from production in "developing countries," a countervailing tendency that is about to run out. As well, they do things like count finance industry activity in GDP, so there are probably some major discrepancies in the official ROP statistics too.
Another countervailing tendency was the addition of computers to business processes, which increased the ROP by reducing non-productive business expenses (such as accounting, financial transactions, etc). The flipside of this is that computers are also going to continue to replace actual workers, especially with highly expensive AI technology, so the ROP is going to take another hit.
Capitalists could obviously try to keep the whole system running even at 1% ROP, but it would be highly unstable, and the other major reckoning, global warming, is basically going to wreck it.

Absent global warming, why? Wouldn't in this situation we quickly get an ongoing consolidation until all that is left is a bunch of monopolists who essentially implement a planned economy for their own benefit? As far as the productive (socially useful) part of the economy goes, that seems to be the trend. The two volatile elements at this point are just finance and primary inputs (things like oil or copper, with gyrating prices).

The "plan" will be absolute wage slavery and full-blown fascism, IE, capitalism in deep decay. That is a very unstable political formation, especially if it has to deal with the entire world's proletariat.

Why would it entail that? If they are monopolists, there is no competitive pressure on the wages. They can just buy the proles off with money they are now saving because they can't invest horizontally anymore (because capital concentration is absolute).

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You have to pay them now, user. There are bureaucracy fees.

what you mean the LLC fee?

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Yes, you unimpressed looking dick.

Would this be accurate?

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The answer is in your assertion.
Rate of profit = profit / total capital value.
Higher capital value ==> lower rate of profit.

if there were nuclear warfare in 2014, sure.

pretty happy about my investment in some of the smaller cryptocoins right now

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Doing its job of reducing labor's bargaining power and redistribution, thus increasing the rate of profit, so yes. Or at least that's how I read it.

What does the y-axis represent here, exactly?

global free trade and immigration is what kills profit of non-multinationals and depresses wages. Even the multinationals lose their profit margins and need to make it up on volume. Simplest is the Walmart vs Mom&Pop where the smaller simply can't compete with an enormous supply chain both vertical and horizontal.

The solution is obvious, protect domestic industry and domestic wages.

If you're wondering why low domestic wages kills profits, it is because it makes consumers poor and they can't buy anything.

This graph is irrelevant because after the midterms we'll be seeing 20% year long growth in the stock market according to some fucking graphs that ignore a lot of nuance.

And idiots say that war is bad for business.

Brainlet posts, Keynesianism is completely debunked.

Real Keynesianism was never tried. If anything has been debunked it's monetarism.

This won’t allow capitalism to keep a positive ROP forever. Marketing can only boost sales so far, and eventually you get to a point where sales can only be boosted if workers are given raises. Which cancels out increased profitability for sales. It’ll also cause companies to compete for labor driving down profitability.

bump

Each time the economy improves it is because of Capitalism changes and adapts to the crisis. You could say it is the dialectic of capitalism and crisis. If no solution is found severe poverty would remain an issue until enough people are fed up and start revolting. Some examples of adaptation are outsourcing, Removal of the Gold Standard (and unlimited debt based spending), crushing the power of unions (The Neo-liberal doctrine). The latest was using tax money to stabilize the banking system and make sure investment kept going.
Sadly, economists have no idea how such a complex system is supposed to work, and will keep trying to patch the system with the economic equivalent of duct tape, until the economy actually breaks at some point. Even worse is that the governments can get away with almost anything, no matter how atrocious or incompetent their attempts might be.

Boom, Bust, Boom, Bust … Boom?

or in this case a pop, unless something that invigorates the economy like a world war comes along then the energy of each boom diminishes.

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Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think marketing increases profitability. What I mean to say is, business executives start thinking of their market as limited to a certain pool of money. Unless they have a compelling reason to suggest they can expand it to some larger group, they think that it can only grow so much. So when there are large companies inhabiting a certain market together, instead of investing into a bunch of capital for greater production or driving down prices they start to act in a way that reduces the chances of either of them doing this, but instead will often opt to spend money on marketing campaigns to try to draw more people to their product, which has similar margins to their competitor.

At the extreme end I guess you could ask the question, can a developed economy maintain a certain equilibrium when in extremely low to zero growth? I think it depends on the context you’re in, but it seems possible. I’d say Japan is the first example I can think of, as a glimpse of this state of affairs becoming nearly taken for granted. If there is going to be a crisis of overproduction, capitalists need to be atomized and hungry for a return that doesn’t exist. They have to feel compelled to continue buying capital goods. But there has been evidence that capitalists are willing to start essentially planning production across firms, formally or informally, to avoid damaging competition like this. However, I think in the past decades some of the European and the American government have shown that they aren’t willing to endure that sort of situation yet, and as long as they believe there is still growth to be had they’ll fight for a higher surplus by crushing workers through cuts to social spending. This could be a mistake that ignites more class antagonisms, but America is impressively class cucked in this regard so it is hard to tell when it will start angering the Republican base.

stochastics, motherfucker

The rate of profit would skyrocket only relatively. Because of all the capital destroyed, absolute return will be much smaller. The question is if the capitalists can be deemed satisfied with a large accumulation of low rate of profit enterprises.