Well duh. It’s a system designed to sustain you just enough to draw labor from you; there are bound to be increased margins of error on that “sustaining” as the labor they want to draw gets higher and higher.
Marx talks about this a good deal in Capital, how “labor power” is an elastic category. Capitalists always want to push it downward by paying workers less, and this inevitably kills some of them.
I need to re-read Capital - it’s been a few years. It was just reminding me of statistics and modeling, and how when you try to extrapolate outside of your data set, you can get all sorts of wild variations. And capitalism is essentially extrapolating outside of the guard rails that keep a society functioning; and so we see social murder driven by capital’s need to extrapolate, as it’s already consumed well what’s reasonable but the rate of profit continues to fall. So if you aren’t getting enough flour from the mill, you simply dump in more grist. The grist in this case is us.
Marx talks about this a good deal in Capital, how “labor power” is an elastic category. Capitalists always want to push it downward by paying workers less, and this inevitably kills some of them.
I need to re-read Capital - it’s been a few years. It was just reminding me of statistics and modeling, and how when you try to extrapolate outside of your data set, you can get all sorts of wild variations. And capitalism is essentially extrapolating outside of the guard rails that keep a society functioning; and so we see social murder driven by capital’s need to extrapolate, as it’s already consumed well what’s reasonable but the rate of profit continues to fall. So if you aren’t getting enough flour from the mill, you simply dump in more grist. The grist in this case is us.