Jim Devine wrote:

> I think that's a key issue. A lot of the FROP stories seem to 
> have no connection with "actually-existing capitalism."  The 
> stories seem to hover at an extremely high level of abstraction, 
> with the authors never getting to how the tendency manifests 
> itself at the level of appearence. One problem is that the profit 
> rate that falls may not be the profit rate that's relevant to 
> capitalist accumulation. 

Agreed.  

Jim continues:
> 
> I'm agnostic about the FROP on the macro-level, perhaps because I 
> don't understand it well enough, but I think that a micro- 
> economic FROP story makes tremendous amounts of sense. This sees 
> the FROP as part of the nature of capitalist competition (as 
> distinct from the neoclassical theory of competition). A 
> capitalist who doesn't change technology in production, 
> management strategies, and/or marketing or political or 
> pollution-emission strategies will suffer from a falling rate of 
> profit. There are two main _structural tensions_ which cause 
> this: the accumulate-to-compete of capitalists and the class 
> antagonism in production. These tensions are not abolished by 
> individual capitalist efforts, so the micro-FROP remains.

But, FROP concerns the "law of the tendency for the *general* rate of 
profit to decline" (emphasis added).  It was never intended to be a micro 
theory that dealt with the causes of declining profitability in 
individual capitalist firms and branches of production, but rather a 
macro theory that concerned aggregate capital and the general rate of 
profit.  The FROP theory, as a consequence, must stand or fall on the 
level of analysing "capitalist production as a whole."

Jerry

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