Initially, I said: > 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.<
Julio Huato wrote: > Here's a simple exercise. I tried this as a student in the late 1990s, after > I realized that *mathematically* it was impossible to prove the "law" in the > terms Marx posed it -- i.e. with constant real wages. ...< With constant real wages, the normal increase in labor productivity raises the rate of surplus-value, counteracting the rise in the "value composition of capital" (VCC). It's possible that the latter rises so much that it overwhelms the profit-boosting effects of the former, but there are other factors to consider, such as the way that increasing labor productivity lowers the value of the means of production, reversing the rise of the VCC. It's quite possible that the rate of profit falls, but that's different from a "secular fall in the rate of profit." First, if we're not talking about a rate of profit that has some real-world impact on the rate of accumulation, it's irrelevant. Second, it the rate of profit that drives accumulation falls, that causes recessions, stagnation, and structural changes. A lot of this -- for example, depressed real wages due to an increased reserve army of labor -- encourages the profit rate to go up again, so that there's no _secular_ trend. the fall of the US rate of profit going from the 1950s/1960s to the 1970s helped fuel structural change in the late 1970s and 1980s, i.e., the neoliberal policy revolution. This tended to _boost_ the rate of profit; objectively speaking, it looks like that was the policy revolution's goal. As I've said before, that created a new problem, one not considered by the "Shaikh-Mandel-et al dogma that capitalism suffers from a secular fall in the rate of profit," i.e. an underconsumption undertow which has (all else equal) slowed accumulation. In response to Julio's "look at the evidence," I said: >What evidence? It depends on your starting and end points.< Everyone I've read accepts the fact -- shown by Julio's data [posted in a private e-mail] -- that the US profit rate (and that in most rich countries) fell between the 1950s/1960s and the 1970s & after (with no recovery to the 1950s/1960s levels). But, as I said above, it depends on your _starting and end points_. The 1950s/1960s -- Julio's starting point -- represent what many call the "Golden Age" and Tom Michl has called "the Great Exception." It was a period of extraordinarily high profit rates, so it shouldn't be any surprise that the profit rate should fall. Julio, how do you deal with the fact that the profit rate _rose_ going into the 1950s/1960s? If we want to test the theory that "capitalism suffers from a secular fall in the rate of profit," we need to look at data going further back. Duménil and Lévy do so for the US, using consistent definitions over time. If I remember correctly, they find no secular downward trend in US profit rate data. -- 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
