Why is the parent being downvoted? As cool as it might be to side with Marx, his solutions do and will always come up short.

The "tendency of the rate of profit to fall" is hardly a problem that needs serious examining especially in this day and age. Our solution to this problem was essentially inflation, and now we got ourselves in a bit of a mess because all that inflated money isn't distributed equally and the wealthier get wealthier as they're the closest to the new money. Most economists reject the idea as a whole. How is it worth examining then? When you convince professional economics to take it seriously, then what? What do you hope to find with it? Or do you just like the sound of yourself pointing out problems? -- this is what Jeff was basically saying.

Your second paragraph really has nothing to do with the rate of profit to fall, and now we're onto Greece? You really think that reckless spending by a government warrants a philosophical economic shift? No of course you don't because you think it was all innocent -- oh sure Greece just ran out of money one day and geez, it must be capitalism's fault!

There's economic downswings. This will always occur for a variety of reasons. Marx's approaches are all way too heavy-handed. You cannot strip someone's freedom and have them still care about their work, and Marx's approach nearly always ends up here. He's given way too much credit as a good, rational thinker for what I see as more just politically-rousing, pulling-on-your-heart-strings social revolution kinda writing. Yes, there's a place for compassion but it is not found in a system and capitalism is a system.

Which brings me to my last point. Your note about not "overlooking the amount of force deployed making capitalism work" is not fair because you're basically equating rule makers with dictators. Capitalism can exist outside of the rule markers in a completely free sense (that's not to say it will be operating perfectly). End of the world happens. Me and my team of 100 people use gold to indicate value and thus begin trading and building value. In Marx's hypothetical scenario, he would probably start calling the shots and complaining about the class struggle. One is a system that runs off of people's free-will and desire for vanity and self-validation and all that. The other is fancy-sounding system that boils down to "You do this. You do that.", which fails the criteria of an autonomous system. Marx's solutions are thus not autonomous and should be immediately rejected on this merit alone.

My advice? Look for the light yourself. Find out what's not working in the current system. Strategize. Plan. Execute. Marx just isn't relevant anymore and, again, should be rejected on that merit alone. I'm all for learning from history and taking away important lessons -- relevant or irrelevant -- but Marx's economic principles are quite literally irrelevant. They have NO relevance with how we operate today. The solution is therefore INCREDIBLY RADICAL, which as we programmers should know, runs the greatest risk! This is why I reject Marx. It's nothing personal against him or because I have some capitalist agenda. I just think we can do better with what we got and should focus on that.