One of the fascinating things about the ideological struggles of the last century is that no one has ever bothered to refute the claim that capitalism is inherently self-destructive. The destruction of exchange value combined, with the preservation of use value, presents opportunities for new capital investment. The successful business attracts competitors by the nature of its success. Eventually, the market is saturated and profits reach the absolute minimum. The value of the original business is destroyed by its own success.
Marx was, of course, was observing the boom and bust cycles of the English industrial revolution. Much later, Joseph Schumpeter, drawing on Marx, wrote “the process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. ” It is a famous line known as Schumpeter’s gale, which is just a clever way of saying that the destructive forces unleashed by capitalism are the cost of progress.
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