Admittedly a Marxist theoretician like Prof. Moseley has nuanced his FROP theory somewhat now:
"I used to think that the falling rate of profit and a realization problem were mutually exclusive causes of crises (and I have taught this to a generation of students). And I still think that is true for any given period. But I have come to realize, as a result of recent decades in the US economy, that in a dynamic, long-run sense, a falling rate of profit may evolve into a realization problem, in circumstances such as the recent decades in the US economy, in which government policies have attempted to avoid a depression and bankruptcies." http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/working_papers_301-35 0/7.4Moseley.pdf If you think I am "trolling" about the Marxist obsession with the falling rate of industry profit, please consult the contemporary Marxist literature for yourself. Quite simply, most Marxists believe it is super-revolutionary and super-radical to attribute the economic crisis to the FROP. It is just that it is a bit difficult to sustain the theory of the falling rate of profit, when average corporate profitability - as business people now acknowledge themselves - is high. What you need to explain - as business people themelves now acknowledge - is why the real investment on which economic growth depends is low, even although profitability is high. For that explanation I think you need some kind of financial theory similar to Toporowski's. It is not something that Marx ever dealt with in any detail, since he obviously could not deal with the financial architecture of business operations in 2013. J.
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