by From Ikonoclast (originally a comment) If history follows the path Thomas PIketty noted, it will take a major war or revolution to change matters. Each time profit rises faster than the overall rate of growth we get a war, like WW1 or WW2 or a great depression like most of the 1930s. Sometimes we get the depression, then the war. Piketty noted that under capitalism’s axioms: If R (rate of return on capital) is Greater Than G (growth in inflation adjusted dollars) then inequality increases. There are real limits to the increase in inequality. People reach the point where they will not tolerate greater inequality. They will rebel against the system and elites enforcing the inequality or be diverted by elite misdirection into attacking others. Piketty’s “Conditional Law of Approach to an
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from Ikonoclast (originally a comment)
If history follows the path Thomas PIketty noted, it will take a major war or revolution to change matters. Each time profit rises faster than the overall rate of growth we get a war, like WW1 or WW2 or a great depression like most of the 1930s. Sometimes we get the depression, then the war. Piketty noted that under capitalism’s axioms:
If R (rate of return on capital) is Greater Than G (growth in inflation adjusted dollars) then inequality increases.
There are real limits to the increase in inequality. People reach the point where they will not tolerate greater inequality. They will rebel against the system and elites enforcing the inequality or be diverted by elite misdirection into attacking others.
Piketty’s “Conditional Law of Approach to an Asymptote” (my clumsy title for it) is fully compatible with Capital as Power theory. There is no need to assume that R and G are measuring real wealth. They are simply the ratios of nominal capital being assigned to each variable by the calculations and operations of the capitalist financial system. Since money does not measure value but rather implements creorder power, then the relative power of the owners of capital axiomatically increases and the relative power of the rest of society axiomatically decreases. However, the decrease in the relative power of the bulk of the people has a lower real limit (more a band than a precise point) this being the physiological or psychological limits beyond which people find life intolerable or impossible. The rise in real inequality will be found to have real limits.
The elites seem determined to push matters to those real limits just as they appear determined to push the biosphere to and beyond the environment’s real limits. We are already in environmental overshoot. We also may not be far away from inequality limits. Rapid evnvironmental recoil or snap-back coming the other way will meet increasing inequality: two asymptotes interfering and compounding. The system will rapidly destabilize without timely preemptive action on both fronts.
That’s me being a keyboard warrior. ;)