me: > "The Marxian story goes from actual profit rates to expected profit > rates to accumulation to aggregate demand. This means that in the > first part of the story sketched in the previous paragraph, we might > see expected profit rates rising, boosting actual profit-rate > realization, which helps raise expected profit rates. This is sort of > like a Keynesian multiplier/accelerator process, but it cannot > continue in the second part of the story."
Lakshmi Rhone wrote: > But isn't this the real story: from declining profits on marginal (real) > investments to speculation and bubbles (abetted by the Fed) to higher > expected profit rates to higher debt-financed expenditures to higher actual > profit rates until the bubble pops. I was saying the quasi-Keynesian multiplier/accelerator process that I described above was limited by supply constraints in the short run. But I don't think that the US has seriously hit those constraints recently. (The exception is with oil supplies, but hitting those helps the profit rates in the oil-producing sector.) Those supply constraints were crucial during the Great Exception of the 1950s and 1960s, during which US capitalism was operating in a "strong-labor" economy (bolstered by what Jim O'Connor called the warfare/welfare state). This political economy encouraged falling profit rates (from their 1960s peak) and stagflation during the 1970s. During the 1970s, the US moved to being a "weak-labor" regime. In that case, capitalist accumulation has been self-feeding in the quasi-Keynesian way: rising accumulation has realized more profits, which then encourages more accumulation _even though_ consumption has been generally stagnant. The latter implies an undertow that has slowed GDP growth. With limits on real growth (and profitability there) being hit, accumulation has become increasingly financialized, involving debt-financed private expenditures, speculation, and bubbles. -- Jim Devine / "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." -- Albert Einstein _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
