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