On Jul 5, 2013, at 11:22 PM, Patrick Bond wrote:
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;
I would rather regard the three phenomena as conjunct aspects of
capitalism's cyclical nature, with the "underlying" process being the
rising *technical* composition driven by the pressure on every firm
facing any competition at all to adopt the most advanced (ie., capital
intensive) technologies.
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.
I basically agree with all of this.
Shane Mage
"Thunderbolt steers all things." Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 64
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