Back in May, I did a short post
(http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2013/05/19/michael-heinrich-marxs-law-and-crisis-theory/)
outlining my rejection of the arguments of Michael Heinrich, a Marxist
scholar. He recently wrote an article in the US journal, Monthly Review,
arguing that Marx’s law of profitability was faulty, empirically
unproven or even unprovable and anyway, Marx decided to drop it in his
later works and only editing distortions by Engels have left us epigones with
the impression that Marx still supported the law.
The law is central to Marx’s materialist conception of
history. If it is believed that, in the long run, the rate of profit
might just as easily rise as fall or that it will tend to oscillate
forever around some average value, as Heinrich suggests, then the
capitalist mode of production takes on the character of a permanent
ongoing system. Instead, Marx’s law of the tendency for the rate of
profit to fall over the long run most convincingly demonstrates the
transient nature of capitalism.
Marx considered the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall as the
most important law of motion of capitalism. And it is because it
explains and predicts crises and slumps under capitalism. And it also
explains why and predicts that capitalism cannot last. Either the
working class will remove the capitalist class and introduce a
democratically planned economy using the resources of the globe in
common to develop socialism, or capitalism will descend into barbarism
just as the ancient slave society of the Roman empire did or the Asian
absolutist states.
http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2013/07/25/returning-to-heinrich/
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