Minqi Li: Marxism and Limits to Growth, Capitalism with Zero Profit Rate?

In this short presentation, University of Utah economist Minqi Li ties together Marxian economics, in particular the theory of capitalist crisis and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and the perspective of the limits to growth. As regular visitors of this blog might have guessed, this seemed to me quite interesting. I tried to improve the sound of the original video so people might hear better.


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Minqi Li's abstract of the paper presented in November 2006, at the Social Structure of Accumulation Conference in Ireland:

"Capitalism is a socio-economic system that rests upon the endless pursuit of profit and capital accumulation. However, after centuries of relentless capitalist accumulation, resource depletion and environmental crisis have reached the advanced stage. The paper discusses the depletion of fossil fuels, the likely effects of various renewable energies and nuclear energy on future energy supply, the limits to improvement in energy efficiency, and the depletion of other resources. It relates the limits to growth to Marx’s hypothesis on the “law of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall.” It can be established that if the growth rate falls towards zero, then either the profit rate or the net investment has to fall towards zero. The coming crisis may be seen as the expression of the conflict between the “productive forces” and the “existing relations of production”. The historical constraints and possibilities for the post-capitalist society are discussed."

Minqi Li was born in January 1969 in Beijing, China. He studied at Beijing University between 1987 and 1990 and participated in the 1989 student movement. Between 1990 and 1992 he was a political prisoner. After 1989, he rejected the bourgeois liberal ideology and moved towards revolutionary marxism. He came to the United States in 1994 and received Ph.D. in economics from University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2002. He taught political science in York University, Canada from 2003 to 2006 and since July 2006 he has been teaching economics at the University of Utah. Minqi Li is the author of The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy.

Recent publicly available articles:
Capitalism with Zero Profit Rate?: Limits to Growth and the Law of the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall (University of Utah Department of Economics Working Paper Series, May 2007)
The United States, China, Peak Oil, and the Demise of Neoliberalism (Monthly Review, April 2008)
Climate Change, Limits to Growth, and the Imperative for Socialism (Monthly Review, July-August 2008)