Reply To: Is capitalism collapsing?
I think the most illuminating chapter on this ; or the crippling of labour power due to either over work or not providing labourers sufficient remuneration to maintain their labour power is in chapter 10 ;
Karl Marx. Capital Volume One
Chapter Ten: The Working-Day
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch10.htm
It broadens the subject out to slavery proper as well as wage slavery.
And talks about replacing crippled labour power of the [Manchester] manufacturers with fresh stock from the ‘peasantry’;
……..from pastures of Dorsetshire, to the glades of Devonshire, to the people tending kine in Wiltshire,……..
Or in the southern slave states or replacing the cripple labour power
…….of the swamps of the Mississippi….
… from the teeming preserves of Virginia and Kentucky……
Or fresh African stock from the slave markets of New Orleans
So it can ultimately be a bit like over working the land, without ‘guano’ like fertilisation to restore it, resulting in diminishing returns on productivity.
Which required remedial action like the Factory Acts;
………the English Factory Acts are the negative expression of the same greed. These acts curb the passion of capital for a limitless draining of labour-power, by forcibly limiting the working-day by state regulations, made by a state that is ruled by capitalist-and landlord. Apart from the working-class movement that daily grew more threatening, the limiting of factory labour was dictated by the same necessity which spread guano over the English fields. The same blind eagerness for plunder that in the one case exhausted the soil, had, in the other, torn up by the roots the living force of the nation. Periodical epidemics speak on this point as clearly as the diminishing military standard in Germany and France…………..
I suppose the ‘demoralisation’ of a national stock of labour power from overwork and/or underpay could have other effects other the obviously physical.
So you might see increasing mental health problems, addictive drug abuse and a rising prison population; as in the US?