Capitalism In Terminal Decline and the Economic Necessity of ‘State Monopoly Socialism’
Ted Reese
Abstract
Ted Reese argues that capitalism is approaching an objective, historically determined breakdown driven by Marx’s law of the falling rate of profit and the accelerating replacement of labor by automation. As labor time, and thus the source of exchange value, contracts, commodity production becomes increasingly unprofitable and unstable, compelling a transition toward a system organized around de-commodified use-values. Reese contends that long-term empirical trends — including secular declines in profit rates, interest rates, productivity growth, and entrepreneurial activity, alongside rising monopolization, state dependence, and speculative asset bubbles demonstrate that capitalism is evolving into advanced state-monopoly capitalism. This formation, he argues, already contains the technical and organizational foundations for “state monopoly socialism,” in which concentrated private enterprises merge into a centralized public monopoly, eliminating exchange and instituting rational planning. Near-term indicators: bank fragility, unprecedented debt levels, deglobalization, and worsening resource and energy constraints reinforce the imminence of systemic rupture.Reese maintains that only the conscious political action of the working class can complete this historically compelled transition, replacing profit-driven commodity production with planned, break-even utility production coordinated through non-transferable labor-time–based digital vouchers.Such a transformation, he concludes, would lay the groundwork for the eventual dissolution of the state and the emergence of higher communism, characterized by falling prices, technological abundance, and the decentralization of wealth and power.
Keywords
Marxism, political economy. falling rate of profit, automation, labor time, exchange value, de-commodification, monopolization, Ted Reese
