Why do so many people speak of "late (stage) capitalism"? Isn't that a bit presumptuous?

It was presumptuous 150 years ago. Lefties keep talking about how capitalism has to do things to sustain itself, as if communism were some kind of perpetual motion machine.

Capitalism will either be toppled or collapse under it's own weight in the United States.

...

what is the current boogeyman to rebel against then?

Your student-loans and what ever you convince yourself the current TPTB is.

; ^ )

lol get a grip dude

Enlighten us. Does it have to do with wealth and the economy?

People have been saying this for more than 100 years now.

When (if) I ever use the term, it's (or it will be) in reference to the increasingly notable standard-lowering of the west and increasing drive to exploit more people and abandon more supposed ideals, paired with the loss of profit and expenditure of resources.

I don't actually see these things as implications that capitalism is sputtering to a close. It's not. There are many measures which can be taken to sustain it, and there will never be a point so shitty that capitalism will just stop unless everybody has died - which is, frankly, pretty unlikely.

But the term is very good for highlighting how shitty things are and how apparent it is in every day life and how western capitalism is increasingly headed towards an authoritarian state capitalist (in the sense of current Russia and China rather than the proper Leninist sense) model. As far as I'm concerned, this change itself is worth opposing, too.

yes, it starts with the letter C and ends with apitalism

holy shit these tatoos are hideous

NUCLEAR WORLD WAR
TAKE THE POSADISM PILL

What is the source of this, and what exactly is the rate of profit/how is it calculated?

girl is a beauty but why the fuck she gets posted in almost every thread?

profit, as defined by marxists, is the difference between wealth generated by worker and his salary

you are new to chans, huh?

I know, I know the basics of marx, just never understood the falling rate of profit theory. So the falling rate of profit basically means the capitalists exploits less and less surplus value from the worker, meaning the worker is paid truer to the wealth created by his labor? I find this hard to believe since all I hear is that wages have stagnated in recent decades while profits soar, and then i'm faced with a graph that pretty much tells me the opposite is true.

no, never seen autists post the same fucking picture each time he posts

Read Trotsky's ABC of Dialectic

Yea of course it is.
We probably gonna have like tech corps as new global states as the next political paradigm honestly,
not socialism or whatever

Facebook is basically a state. Just some more VR and Zuck as pres and we make the transition.

the productivity of workers skyrocketed, not amount of profit. That means that workers now produce fuckton more wealth than they produced in the past, but their wages are not much better, buying power is even decreasing for huge amount of workers.

you are so new you are still in packaging

I acc read that it's pretty good. But how specifically is that relevant to the thread.

The important thing is not the actual amount of profit, but rather the rate of profit.
The thing that drives the rate of profit downward is the requirement to invest in capital to remain competitive in the market. The actual amount that you profit by a cost-to-sell price persepctive as a whole can increase by the development of capital, but the actual profit being produced as a whole off human labor will actually fall.

But how can productivity increase, wages stagnate and profits not increase along productivity lines?

Because expanding the amount you sell doesn't increase the amount you're profiting off the actual process of production, you're just doing more of it in a shorter period of time.

So let me get this straight, the worker is exploited more, but the majority of the surplus value has to reinvested in proportionately more and more capital than before just to maintain profitability? And why is this, because of how competition drives up productivity increases?

Yes.

Huh…I just noticed…

Was annhilfag hungary poster this whole time?

Okay thanks, learned something new today

If you follow this to its eventual conclusion, you end up with an absurd situation: Ten workers will be able to output more commodities than the world can consume as technology outstrips even the rate at which people can consume, and yet nobody will be able to hire any more workers because it won't sell enough, and at the same time nobody will be able to buy anything because almost the entire value exchanged goes into replacing the capital used up in the process of production. We will drown in near valueless commodities that we can't even get rid of.

Also, I'm seriously a theoryless brainlet. This is my understanding after having gone through like four pages of Kapital 1. If someone who actually knows this better than I do wants to correct me, please do so.

The system would have literally collapsed back in 2008. Governments had to give billions to capitalists and stick lower classes with the bill to keep it all going.

Also that was done heavily on reserves of money built up over decades of heavy taxation, for specifically that reason.
There is no more reserve of money.

The workers aren't exploited less. They have to be exploited more in order to generate more profit, to make up for the rate of profit's decline.

So you should understand qualitative changes and quantitative changes and see how that applies to the changing stages of capitalism, from the Imperial model of the 19th and 20th centuries and the transition to finance capital in the 21st and observe how capitalism is transforming from what it was to what it is becoming.