For a higher view I have been looking more to Michael Roberts lately, currently halfway through the book Capitalism in the 21st Century: Through the Prism of Value

What is important to understand is why debt is risen so highly to prominence in the west alongside various rent seeking behaviours, financialisation/rise of the FIRE sector which Hudson mentions, and a general stagnation of economic life for the last few decades. This is because capital must operate within certain laws, one of these is the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

Firms in capitalism are constantly trying to increase their surplus value relative to their competition, and there are many ways to do this. One way of accomplishing this is with new technology. Imagine you and I are competing cloth makers. I produce cloth by hand, and you have a spinning jenny. Who will produce more commodities in a given time, be able to price their cloth lower, and therefore succeed in the market? I will have no choice but to either adopt the spinning jenny, or be forced out of business. Now, imagine someone else comes along with a steam powered cloth loom…

So capitalism has historically been real good at replacing human labour (variable capital) with machine work (constant capital) in order to temporarily increase a given firms profits. Over time the ratio of constant capital and variable capital (called the organic composition of capital) will tend in favour of constant capital, and the relative investment in labour falls. Astute Marx-enjoyers cry out - “Now hold on, I thought only human labour could produce value?” That is right and is exactly the contradiction capital falls into during its technological race.

As capitalists put relatively more surplus value into constant capital rather than variable capital, relatively less labour is employed to produce surplus value and the overall rate of profit falls, even as the mass of profits may rise. Put another way, if the organic composition of capital (how many machines there are) rises faster than the rate of surplus value (how much juice that can be squeezed out of a worker) then the rate of profit falls. This tendency eventually manifests a crisis in which capitalists have to find a way to juice their profits back up.

Note that this is only a tendency, and that capitalists can employ a few different tricks to temporarily stop and even reverse this process.

• lower labours costs of living ( )

• They can increase relative surplus value and pay people less and less and make them work harder (has a limit as paying too little means your workers die)

• try to increase absolute surplus and make people work longer (only so many hours in a day. also people die.)

• use foreign trade profits (harder and harder in a multipolar world)

• They can go abroad and enter less technologically intensive countries and appropriate surplus value that way. (ditto)

• they can flee into speculating on fictitious capital where the points are made up and the rules don’t matter (this is by and large the stock market and FIRE sector fyi)

• war, and destroy all the constant capital like ww2 europe

This is why the capitalists are doing the things Hudson talks about, western capital is stuck in a drawn out sinking of profit rates and, as they are not leashed a la China, flee into things like finance, bitcoin, nft, saudi golf course ice sculptures, wework, internet and technology startups, whatever the fuck promises a way to juice your rate of profit. Industrialisation is gone, China makes everyone’s shit already and what’s left here is basically the high fructose corn syrup version of capitalism