> >How you measuring accumulation? If you're measuring profitability in >relative rather than absolute terms, shouldn't you measure >accumulation relatively as well?
Doug, I meant by accumulation what Jim D is (I believe) referring to as net investment. I think I agree with Jim that the overcoming of crisis need not involve in the first instance a rise in net investment. I am suggeting that what may have provoked the crisis was too high a rate of net investment not in relation to consumption demand as Jim D is suggesting (AS I UNDERSTAND HIM) but in relation to the available valorization base. I am also raising the possibility that a falling rate of profit need not have the trigger of the fall off in net investment or even disinvestment, as Fred M seems to be arguing. The trigger may have been a shortage of easily available, easily exploitable labor (along with cheap energy perhaps). This of course underlines that at its root the profitable expansion of labor depends on the exploitation of living lbor. Rakesh
