What has changed, and characterises the conditions of the last 40 years, is that the ruling-class, as a global class of rentiers, has become dependent upon speculative capital gains on its assets. In the 1980's, the huge rise in productivity from the microchip revolution, led to a massive rise in the rate of relative surplus value, and simultaneously slashed the value of constant capital, both circulating constant capital (materials/components/energy) and notably of fixed capital. That created a huge rise in the rate of profit, but the same factors meant that, as in past such periods, it was followed by a period of stagnation, as the corollary of higher productivity was a slower growth of employment to achieve any given increase in output. In addition, as Marx sets out in Capital III, and in Theories of Surplus Value, this rise in productivity means that even where the physical mass of capital rises, the value of this capital rises much more slowly, or even falls.
The technical composition of capital, as Marx describes, in these conditions, rises but the value composition may fall, meaning a fall in the organic composition of capital. Not only, then, does the rate of profit rise, but it creates a huge release of capital, which may, also, persist year on year for several years, as the new technologies bring above average, year on year rises in productivity, reducing the unit values of the commodities that physically constitute capital. That is what happened in the 1980's and 90's, causing interest rates to fall, and asset prices to rise. The Dow Jones rose by 1300% between 1980 and 2000, whilst US GDP rose by only 256% in that period. The ruling-class, as well as states became dependent on these capital gains on assets, as they basically asset stripped their economies, realising a portion of these capital gains to supplement their revenues.
In addition, a large part of the expansion of industrial capital, in the developed economies, became an expansion of commercial capital, rather than productive-capital. Surplus-value was increasingly produced by low paid labour in newly industrialising economies in Asia, but was realised by commercial capital in the developed western economies, as large areas of previous urban, and industrial land saw coal mines, steel works, tyre manufacture, pottery manufacture and so on, disappear, and be replaced by new retail parks.
The asset stripping of real industrial capital was manifest in the fact that, as the growth in the mass of surplus value/profit eventually slowed, because capital itself was being accumulated more slowly – and more slowly in the developed economies, as it accumulated faster in the developing economies – in order to maintain, revenues from the ownership of assets (rent on land/property, interest/dividends on financial assets, as well as taxes to the capitalist state) the proportion of these, relative to profits, grew whilst the proportion of profit of enterprise/retained profits available for investment, fell. Haldane noted that dividends rose from 10% of profits in the 1970's, to 70% of profits by the early 2000's.
It was the explosion of this contradiction that spelled the end of the delusion that real wealth could be created by continual asset price gains. But, appearance and reality can diverge for a long time, especially where a ruling class, and its state have become fixated upon the delusion, and use their power to cling to it by all means, even as doing so undermines their position even more. So, when reality began to impose itself, and capital continued to accumulate, and interest rates began to rise, causing asset prices to crash, the ruling-class and its state, sought to simply inflate them once more.
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