On Feb 7, 2013, at 12:57 PM, Jim Devine wrote:
...why should anyone put credence in a "law" that's based on an
incomplete, muddled,and
confusing argument? Why did the "tendency for the profit rate to fall"
become a touchstone of "orthodoxy"...
1. Because the underlying argument (as distinct from the unfinished
exposition) can be shown (as I have shown) to be rigorously derived
from Marx's underlying theoretical structure.
2. 'Orthodoxy" is irrelevant . An "orthodox" marxist is no marxist.
The Law should be regarded as a touchstone of Marxian political
economy because Marx himself insists on it: According to Marx, the
falling tendency of the rate of profit is
the actual economic mechanism whereby a capitalist economic system
ultimately is compelled to block its own growth and thereby prove that
it must give way to a higher order:
"The barrier of the capitalist mode of production
becomes
apparent:
1. In the fact that the development of the productive
power
of labor creates in the falling rate of profit a
law, which
turns into an antagonism of this mode of
production at a
certain point and requires, for its defeat,
periodic crises.
2. In the fact that the expansion or contraction of
production
is determined...by profit and by the proportion of
this
profit to the employed capital--thus by a definite
rate of
profit--rather than the relation of production to
social
requirements, i.e., to the requirements of
socially developed
human beings. It is for this reason that the
capitalist mode of
production meets with barriers at a certain
expanded stage
of production which, from the human point of view,
would
be utterly inadequate. It comes to a standstill
at a point
determined by the production and realization of
profit, not
by the realization of human needs...
...The rate of profit is the motive power of capitalist
production,
and things are produced only so long as they can
be produced
with a profit. Hence the concern of the English
economists over
the decline of the rate of profit. That the bare
possibility of
such a thing should worry Ricardo shows his
profound
understanding of the conditions of capitalist
production. The
reproach moved against him, that he is unconcerned
about
"human beings" and has an eye solely for the
development of
the productive forces, whatever the cost in human
beings and
capital *values*--it is precisely that which is the most
important
thing about him. Development of the productive
force of social
labor is the historical task and justification of capital. It
is
precisely in this way that it unconsciously
creates the material
requirements of a higher mode of production. What
worries
Ricardo is the fact that the rate of profit, the
stimulating
principle of capitalist production, the
fundamental premise
and driving force of accumulation, should be
endangered by
the development of production itself. And here the
quantitative proportion
means everything. There is, indeed, something deeper behind it,
of which he is only vaguely aware. It is here
demonstrated in a purely economic way, i.e., from
the
bourgeois point of view, within the limitations of
capitalist
understanding, from the standpoint of capitalist
production
itself, that it has a barrier, that it is relative, that it is
not an
absolute but only a historical mode of production
corresponding
to a definite and limited epoch in the development
of the
material conditions of production."
*Capital* v.3 pp. 303-305
Shane Mage
This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it
always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire,
kindling in measures and going out in measures.
Herakleitos of Ephesos
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