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On Apr 10, 2013, at 12:39 PM, Angelus Novus wrote:
Ralph Johansen wrote:
I certainly don't know how this is all going to settle out, but what
convinced me in reading Kliman's The Failure of Capitalist Production
was that he seemed there to have established empirically the fall
in the > rate of profit
The thing is, "the rate of profit" is not a statistical category
that any government measures. You can't just go look up "the rate
of profit" in the Statistical Abstract of the United States or the
Economic Report of the President.
So instead, you need a method for calculating "the rate of profit"
on the basis of the available statistical material, and as Doug
Henwood has pointed out repeatedly, guys like Kliman arrange their
calculations in such a way so that the results end up "proving" the
doctrinal shibboleth they aim to defend.
In 1963, in my dissertation, I performed a deep analysis on all the
available data and demonstrated a marked (though scarcely
uninterrupted) tendency of the US profit rate as defined by Marx
(aggregate surplus value divided by aggregate private capital stock),
measured both in hours of socially necessary labor time and likewise
in current-dollars, to fall over the period 1900-1960. The old saws
that Heinrich raises as arguments against the Law were taken up and
disposed of in that book (and will again be disposed of in my reply to
his MR article). My dissertation has always been readily available
but Heinrich, Henwood, Angelus et. al remain in willful ignorance of
it. Which enables them to go on sneering at Marx's Law on the basis of
superficial statistics or long-discredited criticisms.
Shane Mage
"All things are an equal exchange for fire and fire for all things,
as goods are for gold and gold for goods."
Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr, 90
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