Like at some point won’t all of the profit be squeezed out of society?
You’ve discovered capitalism’s super hidden secret; infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible.
It is if you count your profit in terms of percentage of global profit, and then, should that break down, in terms of global wealth.
Similar to how it’s impossible to reach the speed of light, it’s not possible to reach 100% of global wealth unless you’re the only sentient being left alive, but you can get arbitrarily close. And getting closer requires more and more human suffering, as reaching light speed requires more and more energy.
Only time will tell whether the rich will (publicly) switch to this metric because so far, “Newtonian” measurements of profit have been sufficient, and fractions of global wealth generation look piddly by comparison.
This article explores that. The Delusion of Infinite Economic Growth
Yes, there is a limit.
First, you need to look at the difference between 1. money and 2. value.
That theoretical one rich person (or company) might own all money printing facilities in the world, and therefore can make endless numbers. That is money, not value.
There is theoretically no limit for the money. But this is meaningless, because this kind of inflated money would be valueless.
The one rich person might own everybody else, and all their belongings, and all that they can produce.
That’s all the value then. That’s your limit.
And further on point 2, the limit would determined by all that people can produce as well as, on the minus side, the costs of keeping those people alive and producing.
As it so happens, people will produce more under better conditions, so spending the least amount possible keeping those people alive doesn’t yield maximum profit - there is a sweet spot somewhere in the curve were the people’s productivity minus the costs of keeping them productive is at a peak - i.e. profit is maximum - and that’s not at the point were the people producing things are merelly surviving.
Capitalism really is just a way of the elites trying to get society to that sweet spot of that curve - under Capitalism people are more productive than in overtly autocratic systems (or even further, outright slavery) were less is spent on people, they get less education and they have less freedom to (from the point of view of the elites) waste their time doing what they want rather than produce, and because people in a Capitalist society live a bit better, are a bit less unhappy and have something to lose unlike in the outright autocratic systems, they produce more for the elites and there is less risk of rebelions so it all adds up to more profit for the elites.
As you might have noticed by now, optimizing for the sweet spot of “productivity minus costs with the riff-raff” isn’t the same as optimizing for the greatest good for the greatest number (the basic principle of the Left) since most people by a huge margin are the “riff-raff”, not the elites.
Technically, money is just a number on a ledger. Practically, there’s a finite amount of wealth in the solar system, much less on earth, significantly less accessible to humans and only a slim amount can be taken from the working class before people start starving. We already have little enough that the population is going to start contracting.
Well I’d say it’s when the proletariat revolts, destroying the machine of exploitation, at which gathering further profit is impossible.
Numbers in ledgers is a description of banking but money and banking are not the same thing.
Alternatively you could be describing money management, keeping a ledger of an account. Money management is the management of money but it is not money itself.
A collection of coins or bills is worth a certain amount and when you add or remove money the amount changes but you do not need to update any accounts.
I’m making a distinction between money as a system of abstracting wealth and what wealth practically means. You’re making a highly disputable philosophical argument about the ontological nature of money instead of engaging with the germaine ideas. Simply put: I don’t consider a physical representation of money to be money in-and-of-itself; I consider each bill to be a part of a grand fragmented ledger. Furthermore, bitcoin is literally a public ledger for which there is no physical exchange of any representation of money. As a final example, the Yap isles famously have a monetary system that has physical Incarnations but no physical exchange among the people of the isles. It’s literally just a public ledger that exists in the minds of those who use it.
In case you want a serious treatment, for nominal profit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_economics#The_Keynesian_multiplier
For real profit, labor productivity must put some limit on it somewhere, but I have never seen anybody look at it.
Either way, “profit” is not something you squeeze out of society. The nominal one can’t be unbalanced, and the real one is hard to even track.
You may get some better answers if think in terms of wealth inequality. But that one won’t appear on the coarse level of the wikipedia article.
