You can probably counter climate change temporarily, too. For example, dumping increasingly larger ice cubes in the ocean every year.
But ya, the analogy isn’t completely one to one, it was just another good example of a a high level system-wide tendency that must be examined over a whole system and over a longer period of time that I thought most people reading would be familiar with.
I think that’s Richard Wolff’s whole thing. I think he’s communist? At least socialist.
Except how are you going to change society without some form of power, which forces you to use the state? I wouldn’t call it utopian what they were describing, while anarchism to me sounds more utopian. Without the power to defend yourselves, the power of capitalists, current, former, or foreign will destroy you.
I consider myself a socialist, but shit, I live in capitalism too and have bills to pay lol.
So for a concrete example, if you end up in the worker coop for a finance company and own a slice of that, or work in Microsoft and are an employee-owner of that, you’d end up a lot better than if you worked in a fast food restaurant you partly owned. Is that kind of what you’re saying?
It sounds like it’s similar to saying climate change isn’t real because the weather was colder one day, when in actuality the theory of global warming is describing an ongoing process and tendency of the temperature to increase in the overall system overall long period of time, it’s not a day to day weather phenomenon you can describe with a singular slice of time.
Ah see, there’s the problem. I don’t think it’s like Newton’s Theory of Gravitation. The rate of profit to fall isn’t some ironclad law that’s applicable in all cases 100% of the time. Cowbee already conceded various ways it could not be true (lack of competition such as through monopoly, exploitation of workers, globalization and imperialism, cartels, trusts, etc).
It seems to describe the natural tendency of a system-wide phenomenon (assuming increasing automation and existing competition in capitalism but nothing really else), so you’d have to consider a macro view of the entire system over a long period of time for it to work. It’s like how you can’t say one section of the world has been getting colder or staying the same for a couple years and thus climate change has been debunked, as you not only need to look at the whole planet but then the next couple decades as well.
So the next company has a brief increase in rate of profit, but then taking a more extended look at the system, everyone will probably switch suppliers to the cheaper wood and someone is going to lower their prices, forcing everyone else to (barring one of the scenarios above).