On Fri, Jul 5, 2013 at 6:17 PM, Shane Mage
<[email protected]> wrote:
But, of course, Marx defined the Law of the falling tendency of the rate of profit as "requiring, for its defeat, periodic crises." Nothing "irreversible" about that--on the contrary, the function of crises is precisely to reverse it! The Law is a *long-term* tendency, an "economic law of motion of modern society." Here are friendly amendments: 1) the tendency to overaccumulation - reflected in rising organic composition of capital and overproduction - seems to me to be the underlying law; 2) as one symptom of which, the rate of profit tends to fall, but countervailing tendencies can temporarily restore it (Marx identified some, but not all), as crisis tendencies are temporarily or spatially displaced; 3) the resolution of those tendencies within a crisis only occurs when there is substantial devalorisation of the overaccumulated capital in both financial and productive forms (e.g. 1870s, 1930s - but since the 1970s the displacement techniques have prevented sufficient devalorisation for a new round); 4) then the process begins anew as a new round of accumulation sets off those durable tendencies again; and meanwhile, 5) class struggles (and other struggles affecting accumulation) tend to ebb and flow, but ultimately have not yet been sufficient to affect the underlying tendencies to crisis. So crises are not permanent but the tendency to crisis (via overaccumulation) is durable, a permanent law of capitalism. |
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