Addendum to my earlier post on this topic, a thought experiment. 1) Think of a non-definitional and radically critical claim about capitalism you believe to be necessarily true. 2) How would you establish this claim *is* in fact a necessary consequence of capitalism, rather than (say), an accidental but unfortunately persistent outcome of capitalisms to date? 3) If you can't establish the necessity of this consequence, what is your principled response to a liberal type (say, a new incarnation of Keynes) who suggests modifying the system without scrapping it? Example of a necessarily true claim about capitalism, and its (necessarily?) mathematical underpinnings: the "Fundamental Marxian theorem" shows that the rate of profit (or interest) is positive if and only if the rate of exploitation is positive. The proof involves use of the Frobenius theorem of matrix algebra. Speculatively, Gil Skillman
