Re: [A-List] Internal contradictions of capitalism

[Hudsonmi@xxxxxxx]

Stan refers to the internal contradictions of capitalism.
       I believe that the major internal contradictions have turned out to be finance and rent-yielding property (real estate, mineral rights and privatized monopolies). Finance is tearing apart industrial capital by turning erstwhile industrial firms into financial vehicles. 
       The process of avoiding taxation meanwhile leads to shifting the tax burden onto labor and creating a permanent fiscal crisis, U.S.-style, as well as an international and domestic debt crisis.
       Marx believed that finance capital would become subordinated to the technological imperatives of industrial capital. He was too much an optimist in his "materialist view of history."
       Marx also thought that industrialization would get rid of Ricardian rent, by "industrializing" the soil through chemical fertilizers, etc. He was right and Ricardo wrong, but he had little to say about the rising role of "rent of location" and of property income and "unearned" rentier income far overshadowing profits.
       The largest element of property in modern industrial economies remains land, not industrial capital.

       Michael Hudson