What Everyone Should Know About How Capital Works

4 hours ago

Marx's analysis of capitalism is based on contradictions, a concept absent in bourgeois economics, which prevents mainstream economics from fully understanding capital.
The contradiction between micro and macro levels is central: individual capitalists' profit-maximizing actions lead to systemic issues like falling profit rates, which bourgeois institutions struggle to manage.
Marx's method uses historical materialism and dialectics to view capital as an evolving, organic totality, where economic concepts are interrelated and change over time.
Value, defined as socially necessary labor time, evolves with capital's development, and overproduction (anti-value) is a key contradiction in advanced capitalism.
Contradictions, unlike problems, cannot be solved but only managed within the system, disappearing only when the system itself ends, such as the link between wage labor and capital.
The ruling ideas of neoliberalism, like Thatcher's TINA, ideological abstractions from material conditions, sustain capital's dominance by masking systemic dependencies.
Dialectical thinking, inspired by Hegel but adapted to historical materialism, is essential for understanding capital as an ecosystemic totality with a beginning and potential end.
Current trends, such as AI and financialization, exacerbate contradictions, leading to inequality, environmental degradation, and crises, highlighting the need for a Marxist political economy.

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