ABSTRACT
The rate of surplus-value is directly proportional to the rate of profit where the organic composition exerts contradictory upward and downward pressures on the rate of profit. Technology plays a role in setting both the rate of surplus-value and the organic composition because it influences productivity and the usage of production technology. Until the middle of the 1970s, the organic composition continuously increased, whereas the rate of surplus-value continuously decreased, which resulted in a falling rate of profit. For Marx, financial crises are not avoidable by regulated financial markets or moral rules that limit the greed because greed is a necessary structural feature of capitalism that derives from the necessity of capitalists to accumulate capital and to increase profit rates or perish. The shares in railway, mining shipping companies represents the real capital where the capital invest and function in the enterprises or the sum of money advanced by the share-holders to be spent in these enterprises as capital.
