The first point could be boiled down to: you can only extract profit from human labor. Machines can only pass on the value that was put in it by human labor. To ilustrate, imagine that human labor is like a fire, and a machine is like a bottle of water. The fire generates heat, and can pass it on to the bottle, wich can pass it down to something else, but the bottle will never generate heat itself. Its the same with human labor generating value and passing it on to machines, that can pass it down to other products, but the machones do not generate value themselves. For the capitalist to turn a profit they need to generate value somewhere, and if theres no lavor, theres no value being created; so it stays as a 0 sum game (wich means 0 profit).

The second point refers to the fact that every part of the economy tends to lose its margin of profit over the time. That happens for many reasons, but the important point is that: give enough time and any business will become less and less profitable. What that means in the context of what the guy was saying, i cant tell

[–] zedcell@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 5 days ago

One thing to note is that machinery does not impart value onto the things they produce because they can produce so many things for a relatively low fixed cost. Marx equates the infinitesimal value imparted by machinery to that of the forces of nature. This is an important part of why the exchange value of goods produced by machinery drops dramatically.

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