Marx never said capital has no nation. He knew very well that capital could not
exist without the state.
The FROP literature often does assume the world economy, at least Grossman did.
It is just that, to clinch the argument, Marxists use value-added statistics
and capital stock data from the USA, large EU countries and Japan individually.
Kliman’s FROP “proof”, for example, is essentially “physicalist”. He assumes
like most other Marxists, that total surplus value equals total profit, and
that this is equal to the net value added (net output) minus the wages of
productive labour, and that constant capital equals fixed capital assets and
inventory. If the capital stock increases faster than his gross profit measure,
the profit rate falls. But this ignores that value-added statistics are
designed to measure factor costs, and that they diverge from the real gross
incomes actually received by enterprises. The larger the financial sector, the
larger the proportion of income which is not included in value-added.
It is of course quite easy for profitability to be sustained by international
unequal exchange, but this does not appear in value-added statistics. If, say,
the US imports a product, and sells it on domestically for a much higher price,
then the “value added” is accounted for as new value created by US enterprises.
J.
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