/biz/ - Business & Finance

>>12632632
>>12632665
It's not an issue of running out, the harder it is to get the proper sand for concrete so does the cost of making concrete go up. A sudden increase in demand due to new industrialization may increase the amount of cement/concrete produced, but the increasing difficulty of getting that sand will only become more acute.

Marx actually predicted a phenomena similar to this, that the value of goods will increasingly be made up of the raw material within them instead of labor. Although, unlike his prediction, this isn't just because all other industries are becoming more capital intensive. It's also because the extraction process of natural resources becomes more labor AND capital intensive over time because all the resources that are the easiest to extract are exhausted first.

>>12010531
Yeah, tell me about it anon.

Communism, as far as Marx was concerned was born from the economic development of capitalism. Capitalism naturally centralizes production, making it more social, both in terms of the labor needed for production, and the distribution. As the firms gain market power, they also fail to pass on the benefits of the efficiency of their economies of scale to consumers, which is why they need to be brought into social ownership.

At the same time, as new labor saving technology is created due to competition and rising costs of labor because of class struggle, capitalists see their rate of profit drop. This is because it constantly takes larger and larger investments in physical capital and so on to make the same returns. The tendency for the rate of profit to fall produces instability as capitalist investors put more and more of their money into riskier bets to maintain the same level of returns. As this is going on, the response to automation by capitalists is also to just make more unemployed people.

The communist solution is clear, remove profit and private property as a coordinating mechanism for the economy, and reduce the work week so you can have full employment while automation occurs. People work less hours for a better standard of living.

The communist countries of the 20th century all emerged from semi-feudalism, which means they spent all their time trying to catch up to the advanced capitalist countries. It's no surprise it didn't quite work that way.

My interpretation of Marx is mostly based on an accelerationist reading of Capital, and besides Capital itself, I'd highly recommend checking out some of Althusser's work, especially Ideology and State ideological apparatuses, and the philosophy of the encounter.

>>11988296
He did complain about that, but he also said it was a necessary condition for the full development of a capitalist economy, upon which communism is built. Protectionism generally has a degenerating effect on industries in capitalism.

While Marx and Engels believed both free trade and protectionism were plausible paths to communism, free trade was the more accelerationist option.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1888/free-trade/