Michael,
Your appreciation of Michael Heinrich and Angelus Novus is perfectly honorable, and I would agree with Heinrich in that rising productivity does not automatically lead to a falling rate of profit (and with a few other points about semi-autonomous variables in the equations, and data problems). But what you are doing here, is just advertising a status - the real point is whose argument is correct. And I think myself there are still problems with all the arguments offered in the series. What troubles me most of all though, is the suggestion that if the TRPF is false, that Marx in that case "has no theory of crisis". In actual fact, Marx - as he himself indicated at the end of his life - did not have a comprehensive causal theory of crises to start off with, and he was most probably well aware that different crises had a different causal sequence, with a different concatenation of events. He was most likely quite aware that there are innumerable empirical factors which can influence profitability, but he lacked the data to study it all. He did however establish that the crises are system-immanent, and he indicated several sorts of possibilities for crises breaking out. That is precisely the reason why different schools of thought on the topic emerged in the history of Marxism. The real scientific challenge is to do what Marx himself did not do but wanted to do, and that is to study the actual recurrent crises there have been, to find out what the patterns actually are, in other words, to establish the specificity and possible recurrent patterns of crises, and how this relates to the "ideal-typical" picture which Marx provided in his manuscript. There is really a paucity of research in that area, although there are of course many empirical studies of the rate of profit by now, based on value-added statistics and net fixed capital estimates (which do not necessarily correspond to actual business profitability, as any serious econometrist can tell you). Ever since Althusser, Marxists are very fond of talking earnestly about "levels of abstraction", but evidently they don't understand much about it, since they habitually confuse an abstract model of the laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production "in its ideal average" with the concrete historical reality of bourgeois society as a whole. J.
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