In the most basic sense, the most apparent one from my perspective is that creating enough—even an excess—is not an acceptable amount to make to stay viable.
This was something that Thomas Harrington proposed initially. He went through the mechanics of how a worker at a shoe factory needed to make, say, fifty shoes in order to afford one pair. After he shoed himself and his family, there were too many shoes to know what to do with. The same thing occurred with the money made from selling the shoes where it became abstract and needed to be made into foreign investment in order to manifest, but continued to abstract itself over and over again. The profits and the physical creating, in Harrington's model, were perpetuating abstractions that had to be forced to manifest—often brutally—stemming from a "problem," in that everybody had enough shoes.
But, though Marx was aware of Harrington, he streamlined this and got to the heart of it a little bit better.
In determining how this same issues existed in feudalism, Marx concluded:
Marx wrote:The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows up out of the production relations themselves, thereby simultaneously its specific political form. It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers — a relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity — which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state. This does not prevent the same economic basis — the same from the standpoint of its main conditions — due to innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural environment, racial relations, external historical influences, etc. from showing infinite variations and gradations in appearance, which can be ascertained only by analysis of the empirically given circumstances.
So much is evident with respect to labour rent, the simplest and most primitive form of rent: Rent is here the primeval form of surplus-labour and coincides with it. But this identity of surplus-value with unpaid labour of others need not be analysed here because it still exists in its visible, palpable form, since the labour of the direct producer for himself is still separated in space and time from his labour for the landlord and the latter appears directly in the brutal form of enforced labour for a third person. In the same way the "attribute" possessed by the soil to produce rent is here reduced to a tangibly open secret, for the disposition to furnish rent here also includes human labour-power bound to the soil, and the property relation which compels the owner of labour-power to drive it on and activate it beyond such measure as is required to satisfy his own indispensable needs. Rent consists directly in the appropriation of this surplus expenditure of labour-power by the landlord; for the direct producer pays him no additional rent. Here, where surplus-value and rent are not only identical but where surplus-value has the tangible form of surplus-labour, the natural conditions or limits of rent, being those of surplus-value in general, are plainly clear. The direct producer must 1) possess enough labour-power, and 2) the natural conditions of his labour, above all the soil cultivated by him, must be productive enough, in a word, the natural productivity of his labour must be big enough to give him the possibility of retaining some surplus-labour over and above that required for the satisfaction of his own indispensable needs. It is not this possibility which creates the rent, but rather compulsion which turns this possibility into reality. But the possibility itself is conditioned by subjective and objective natural circumstances. And here too lies nothing at all mysterious. Should labour-power be minute, and the natural conditions of labour scanty, then the surplus-labour is small, but in such a case so are the wants of the producers on the one hand and the relative number of exploiters of surplus-labour on the other, and finally so is the surplus-product, whereby this barely productive surplus-labour is realised for those few exploiting landowners.
This is all to say, that the issue with production, and how we produce things, creates the society in which we live.
But you weren't exactly looking for that.
Within capitalism in particular, you are looking at a mode of production that is both uncentralized, in that an individual can theoretically choose to do what he or she wishes with a company (for instance) but increasingly centralized in that in order to compete, more and more forces need to be kept tightly in control in an increasingly centralized way. The need to innovate, to create, to use certain freedoms absent in feudalism are nullified by the economic expansion and need to continue growing. Google famously adopted for itself the motto, "Don't be evil." Assuming we can say that they were a couple of guys in a garage, this has changed to a multi-national conglomerate where their headquarters are located in tax havens (in Ireland, actually, where the state through its own set of contradictions is forced to defend its right not to tax Google against its own financial interests); that uses a variety of front companies from all over the world (Alphabet) that creates further companies to feed a centralized need; to the point that a certain almost totalitarian culture under the guise of freedom (stay at work all day and we'll add a ping-pong table) becomes increasingly obvious and apparent.
Here centralization and freedom come to an increasing point of conflict.
Speaking of technology, the workforce must become increasingly mechanized if it is to stay competitive. So Ford invented the assembly line; the assembly line was replaced by robots; the workers that bought the cars can not afford the cars. Other markets open up in order to sell the cars to the workers that cannot afford. The workers, now out of work, need to find other jobs. Having been specialized in, say, fender assembly, they become less valuable to Google (or wherever) as their workers (let's say in 1997) are specialized.
As Google begins to expand, it no longer wants specialized workers in the same way that Ford does not. Now there are phone banks and guides to use on the phones that make up the majority of Google employees (I am using this as a basic example, not as an iron truth) and so unspecialized labour becomes increasingly valuable for these jobs. The more skill the worker has, in short, the less valuable he or she is as businesses become increasingly specialized while at the same time demanding less specialization.
Expanding out upon this, there is a violent viability within the market as to what is being produced and not produced. Most famously, this is why controls over what can and should be grown have been put into place. If blueberries sell well, it is to the benefit of the farmer to get rid of his wheat and grow blueberries. Then the market gluts, fluctuates, and collapses. This basic principle applies to a lot—As the economy booms, labor costs rise and profit margins are changed, thus causing a crash. Labor gets cheaper, industry recovers, and the cycle begins anew.
Labour itself brought in to do this work changes. Migration is a big issue. The capitalists need cheap labour, so they go abroad or silently encourage new labour to come into a market as it collapses collective value. There is then a struggle among labour, a deal signed, and in each case the migrant labour becomes more valuable. To exclude them means the illegal labour becomes more valuable; to expel them means the market they are from becomes more enticing to move to; to brutalize them means they will do the work for cheaper.
This exists on a global scale, all of these things. And all of them, and certainly more, are contradictions that have no particular solution within the confines of the capitalist system.
...If that makes sense. I'm late for work and wanted to get this out there.
Alis Volat Propriis; Tiocfaidh ár lá; Proletarier Aller Länder, Vereinigt Euch!