The time period 1960–2015 is one, in which the computer has arisen, shaped, and transformed capitalist economies. As a result, both in the USA and the EU15 countries the organic composition has, in this period covering 55 years, increased from around 20% to almost 30%, which confirms Marx’s analysis that there is a tendency of the organic composition to rise that results from the technification and scientification of production. The rate of profit in both the USA and the EU dropped as a result of increasing wages and the working class’ struggles in the 1960s until the middle of the 1970s, the time of a large global economic crisis. In the decades following the mid-1970s, the increasing organic composition puts a downward pressure, and the increasing rate of surplus-value put an upward pressure on the rate of profit. The microelectronic revolution extended and intensified the role of technology in capitalism and financing computerisation accounted for a growing share of total capital. As a result, the rate of profit both in the EU and the USA fluctuated and never returned to the rates it had reached in the 1960s.
Chapter Nine | Social Media and the Capitalist Crisis
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The Capitalist Crisis