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Heinrich merges two applications of the rate of profit for his attack: its explanation of inevitable crises in capitalism, and as an explanation of capitalism arriving at a point where it breaks down or its economic failure drives people to revolution.
The crisis aspect does not depend on a rising organic composition of capital. (See for example my From Capitalism to Equality, chapter five.) Ignorin that, Heinrich pounds away at organic composition in his observations about the math, although he carefully avoids the word "organic."
The barrier that capitalism reaches, signaling that its relations of production (with the wage relation at the heart) have become an impassable fetter on development, is another matter. Arguments that a rising organic composition brings capitalism to this barrier have never held up.
Marx founded the science of history. The basic concepts are sound. That does not mean that Marx explained everything without error. But if you want to throw out the entire science, you start with a problem and enlarge it to the whole. Heinrich, by not sorting out these two matters related to the rate of profit, disparages the whole labor theory of value that Marx gave us along with its results about surplus value, class struggle, and the capitalists' necessary and inhuman devotion to the rate of profit above all else.
And so Heinrich declares that Marx only dimly realized late in life that he had failed because in economics everything depends on everything else: "It is questionable, however, whether or to what extent the presentation of the 'shapings of the total process' envisioned by Marx for book III is at all possible in abstraction from the state and the world market. If, however, this is in fact not possible, then the construction of Capital as a whole is called into question." Despicable stuff.
Charles Andrews ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
