Hans Ehrbar wrote: > Have any of you researching the falling rate of profits > thought about the possibility that one of the counteracting > tendencies which Marx did not see is the so-called fossil > fuel bonanza, i.e., the fact that energy has been incredibly > cheap all through the industrial revolution, and got even > cheaper since then with the move from coal to oil and > natural gas?
Hi, Hans. To my mind, the "rational core" of Marx's sketchy and totally unfinished theory in volume III of CAPITAL is that there's a distinction between what's good for the individual capitalist and what's good for the capitalist class as a whole (what allows sustained extended reproduction). This can cause the rate of profit to fall, though it doesn't have to be due to a rising technical composition of capital. It can appear as a general crisis of realization -- or a drive to over-use raw materials. Unfettered capitalist accumulation always goes too far, like a bunch of unsupervised toddlers playing in a room holding various dangers. Thus, we can have a severe energy shortage whether or not we are running out of energy in some absolute sense of that phrase: seeing cheap energy sources, capitalists rush to exploit them (to capture natural rents) which eventually drives up energy prices (and the true cost of its production and use). Given the way in which operating in a cheap-energy world has become normal and built into the structure of production, this causes adjustment problems, as seen in a falling rate of profit. The traditional way to deal with falling profitability is via recession, but it can also show up as inflation or as a combination of the two (stagflation, as in the 1970s). Eventually, the profit rate recovers and accumulation starts up again, driving capitalism to run into new barriers, which causes the profit rate to fall again. There may not be a trend in the real price of energy, but the true cost of its production and use tends to rise, because the capitalists can dump external costs on the rest of us. This is one form of immiseration. -- Jim Devine / "When truth is nothing but the truth, it's unnatural, it's an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world. In nature there are always so many other irrelevant things mixed up with the essential truth." -- Aldous Huxley _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
