Re: Question about the profit rate

[ALI KADRI <akadri_00@xxxxxxxxx>]

THE SLACK appears most pellucid in the developing
world. tightening the slack means reigning in national
bourgeois or socialist regimes. but where is the
starting point for the cycle, in the periodic ten
years thing or in the kondratiev long cycle, in other
words, where to begin in the assessment of the
tendency of the rate of profit to fall. we have had
100 years of you know what all of which is aimed at
dodging this tendency and the worst of it for the
first half happened in Europe as for the second half
it is happening as we speak in the developing world. I
do not think that the tendency is endogenous or sui
generis unavoidable,  such thing exists as a remote
mathematical abstraction and not as adequate
conception of the social. the social conceived
adequately is imperialism.
--- Jurriaan Bendien <j.bendien@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Michael,
>
> I still could not attempt to answer your question,
> because (1) it depends
> on how you define the general rate of profit. For
> example, do you include
> taxes in the mass of surplus-value, if so, which
> taxes. (2) It is not clear
> what exactly you mean by endogenous/exogenous. Very
> few people to my
> knowledge tried to precisely define what this means
> in Marx's economic
> theory, as distinct from neo-classical economics.
> For example, Ernest
> Mandel did, but he is not necessarily correct in
> this, bearing in mind he
> bases himself closely on Marx's unfinished works.
>
> For what it is worth, briefly summarising, I think
> there has been a
> "regime" change cause both by internal  factors (for
> example, change in
> technology) and so-called "extra-economic" factors
> (changes in social
> arrangements, institutional arrangements). These
> create an environment in
> which the rate and mass of surplus-value can rise
> significantly, and some
> constant capital costs reduced. But to identify and
> weigh all the factors
> involved would be a huge empirical research project
> that is beyond my
> capacity. I have trouble enough with one country.
> The Dutch Marxist
> scholar Robert Went is publishing a book on the
> subject in August, called
> The enigma of globalisation (Routledge) but he does
> not do the empirical
> analysis, he just sketches the frameworks for
> analysis.
>
> Very sweepingly, I would  say it was "discovered" it
> the 1980s that the
> crisis problems of capitalism had been exaggerated
> and that if you looked
> more closely at the actual functioning of the system
> and social
> arrangements, there was a lot of "slack" in it, if
> you tighten up the
> slack, capitalism motors on. What was required was
> for the bourgeois
> classes to have some "balls" and focus better on the
> key thing, getting
> more productivity.
>
> Jurriaan
>
>


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