>>154>Surplus can be generated by technological development on the means of production.Yes but that's a rhetorical trick, it's still workers that are building the means of production, and that is where the capitalists extract surplus. Machine capital itself is dead labor that can't produce surplus.
>It is the nature of the snake eating its own tail and that is the reason why the rate of profit tends to fall because because it makes the production of commodities infinitely cheaper over a period of time across the entire market.This is dense theory stuff about the falling rate of profit.
Marx made the argument that technological advances would undermine the rate of profit, and that isn't entirely true. A Japanese Marxist by the name of Nobuo Okishio did refute the technological argument for the falling rate of profit, but in doing so laid the foundation for a demographic argument that supports the tendency for the falling rate of profits. It's very technical theory stuff. It basically states that capitalists are depleting the population and thus deplete their source of profits.
Check out this video if you want to understand the details:
https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=_BkMiZze4ak>>158>Capitalist can reduce the need for workers to the point that they'd be de facto not needed.>You already see this in the 3rd world where unemployment rates of 15%-25% are common because of agricultural automation in the West.You are saying that capitalists can use technology as a tool for class war to reduce worker wages and have a large reserve army of labor. To some extend this is true, but when they do that and really squeeze the proletariat, workers won't reproduce them selves and demographic trends will cause labor shortages down the line and restore the power of the proletariat in the future.
If the capitalists want to keep ahead of the demographic process to maintain their profitability they have no choice but to reduce capital-stock faster than the falling demographic trends.
However there is a catch, advancing technology necessarily increases the amount of capital stock that is needed, because more advanced technology comes with higher energy needs and higher system complexity.
The other problem with the shrinkage strategy is that countries like China are not going to do that, and if the capitalists in the west shrink their industrial bases they will eventually become irrelevant to world history. It could be that the west turns into an ossified version of end-stage capitalism with semi feudal social relations that reduces the role of technology to tools for subduing the population. While the west fades away as a civilization. Obviously China is not going to become a colonial power that conquers the west and forces it to change from the outside, but if they keep leveling up their own development that will eventually bleed through.
Capitalists will also try to counter-act demographic development by moving parts of the system around, like offshoring production or making labor-power move from one country to another. Obviously that is not a fix for anything, because moving things around doesn't create more things.