The overarching goal of communism is for laborers to own the means of production instead of an owning/capitalist class. Employee owned businesses are the realization of communism within a capitalist society.
It seems to me that most communist organizations in capitalist societies focus on reform through government policies. I have not heard of organizations focusing on making this change by leveraging the capitalist framework. Working to create many employee owned businesses would be a tangible way to achieve this on a small but growing scale. If successful employee owned businesses are formed and accumulate capital they should be able to perpetuate employee ownership through direct acquisition or providing venture capital with employee ownership requirements.
So my main questions are:
- Are organizations focusing on this and I just don’t know about it?
- If not, what obstacles are there that would hinder this approach to increasing the share labor collective ownership?
Thanks for the detailed explanation, and sorry for the late response. Mine was just a simple counterexample to show that the tendency doesn’t always apply. You’re right that the c2 I used is wrong, and it should be s1+v1+c1, although that would still not change the result. My example was in the case where one producer wants to compete with another with a lower price, so chooses to trade a lower s for a bigger market share, so I wasn’t really getting into improved productivity, I was just addressing your initial statement of “competition forces prices down”.
In a real economy this chain would be much more complicated with way more steps and even backpropagation of some of the values. If we have a rate of decline of profit for company 1 called R1 and a rate R2, the overall R would only decline if R2 > R1, otherwise it would increase. So to prove a general declining rate of profit you would have to prove that the decline propagates fast enough through the entire chain.
Also, I fail to see how c/v (organic composition of capital) necessarily increases. If prices lower (due to competition, or productivity as you have said), then c will also decrease for the companies using those products (as I have shown in my example) as the cost of machines and input lowers (a computer in 2025 costs way less than the same one in 2000). To prove that c/v increases you would have to prove that dc > dv (derivatives), which is not at all clear since, while they both decrease, they can decrease at varying rates which are not predictable.
No worries about taking time, I’m on social media less and less myself these days. I think the biggest problem with the way you’re looking at the TRPF is using microeconomics to describe a macroeconomic pressure. Marxist analysis stresses the interconnectedness of economics, and trying to view 2 companies while obfuscating the rest of the economy is going to run into false assumptions about a general pressure that applies to economies at scale.
In the instance of R2 and R1, the decline in costs from the input of R1’s price to R2 applies to the rest of the chair manuracturers. If company 2 doesn’t also lower their prices as their cost of input has lowered to match other chair companies, then they will run into fewer total sales. Competition places a negative pressure on Surplus, and increasing productivity of machinery increases Constant Capital in relation to Variable Capital, so the biggest source to counteract the Rate of Profit’s decline is by lowering V or stagnating it with respect to productivity, which is what we are seeing now more than anything else.
As for OCC, think of it in this manner: if machinery costs less for better productivity, then it will be employed more. Economies of scale work precisely because of this grand increase in OCC, which is why equivalent goods cost so little today in comparison to 50 years ago. Selling more widgets for a lower rate of profit per widget but greater total profits is the bread and butter of commodity production, and industrialization. If a worker at the widget factory produces 100 widgets with machine A, and 1000 widgets with machine B, then the OCC is rising. Automation increases OCC. Here’s Marx in Capital:
[Emphasis mine.]
I really don’t know what it is exactly that you’re taking issue with. If you agree with Marx’s Law of Value at its base, then the TRPF follows from it mathematically as a general downward pressure, not as an ironclad linear relationship. If you don’t agree with Marx’s Law of Value, then the TRPF isn’t worth fighting against, there are other more standard attacks on it. Do you consider yourself a Marxist? That might help me understand where you’re coming from a bit more.