> On May 3, 2012, at 3:50 PM, Jim Devine wrote: > ... In a "laborabundant" or "weak labor" economy, a rising profit rate is > encouraged. It's true that the stagnant incomes of the vast majority (the > 99%) hold back consumer demand (absent a consumer credit boom), but to some > extent rising profit rates can be realized by increased accumulation rates -- > just as rising profit rates finance and motivate increased accumulation > rates. (Is a path that Tugan-Baranowsky posited, and might be called > "profit-led" or "bootstrap" growth.)...Obviously, this story leaves a lot of > stuff out so cannot be used to describe recent real-world events exactly.<
Shane Mage writes: > "not exactly" is quite an understatement. The "profit rate" is an ambiguous > term here. it's quite unambiguous in the papers I have written on this subject. > Marx's model of accumulation and falling rate of profit tendency > is based on some very severe abstractions: prices are competitive (prices of > production), profit of enterprise accounts for all the surplus value > produced in the economy (rent and interest are set at zero), and > unproductive labor plays no independent role. I don't accept the Shaikh-Mandel-et al dogma that capitalism suffers from a secular fall in the rate of profit, so I don't see how that's relevant. > How far this [Marx's?? my??] model is from > "real-world events" is indicated by the current division of "profit" in the > US: only thirteen percent of "profit" is accounted for by manufacturing even > though the great bulk of productive labor is employed in manufacturing! > Thus more than four-fifths of US surplus value takes the form of interest > and rent, fictitious profits from fictitious capital, and is predominantly > directed to luxury consumption and business construction destined for the > employment of unproductive labor (office buildings, shopping malls, etc.) I don't see how this is relevant. > Thus the productive sector is in fact starved of the investible capital > whose productive investment, as Tugan (following Marx) points out, is the > motor force for an accumulation path free from severe crises. An economy > where the rich gain their "income" from financialized economic rents > (notably from resource monopolies and "intellectual property") is condemned > to stagnation and decline and can escape underconsumption only during > periodic bubbles each of which leads to a worse hangover than the last. I don't know about "starved," but the last part makes sense. -- Jim Devine / "An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support." -- John Buchan _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
