On Apr 25, 2008, at 9:08 PM, Jim Devine wrote:
How then to explain the present crisis if rates of profit have
generally
recovered? Firstly of course, there has been a decline in the USA
since
around mid 2006, although only marginally it should be said. I
think the
present crisis can be best explained as a major disproportion in
one section
of production - residential housing - combined with a major
financial crisis
- rather than a general crisis of over-accumulation.
If this is correct of course, it means that there will not be a great
depression or anything like it, even if the present US crisis still
has some
way to go, but that its effects will be very significantly offset
by the
growth of the world economy, which is not so dependent on US
consumer demand
as the left would have us believe.
why can't there be another cause of a great depression besides
over-accumulation (as the Jeffries defines it)? BTW, the evidence I've
seen indicates that the rate of profit was rising in the US before
1929, especially in manufacturing, the corporate sector.
In Marxian theory a depression (the devaluation of overaccumulated
capital) expresses not a drastic fall in the profit rate (though that
appears, as symptom) but
a drastic fall in the profitability of new investment--what Keynes
calls the Marginal Efficiency of Investment. It is an expectational
variable and as such does not appear, cannot appear, in ex post
statistics. It occurs precisely after a period of high profitability
and hence high accumulation.
Shane Mage
"Thunderbolt steers all things...it consents and does not consent to
be called Zeus."
Herakleitos of Ephesos
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