Re: Rates of profit: a recent article

[Jurriaan Bendien <bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have always been an admirer of your work, and your very careful attention
to what Marx actually says in his writings, and I would like to take the
opportunity to ask some questions (I don't know if you have time to answer
them). Your RP is an average "value" RP pertaining to the sphere of
production only, but quantitatively its magnitude depends a lot on the
definition of (Uf) (whether it enters in the nominator or denominator, since
if it does not enter in the denominator, it enters into the nominator; an
increase in Uf depresses ).

Question 1: Regarding V, which service labour precisely do you now define as
"non-productive" (you mention "supervisory" and "commercial" labour), and
what is the quantitative difference in the trend, if you include all
non-FIRE sector net wages in variable capital ? (You mention that the annual
costs of (Uf) was over half  of the total surplus-value produced by
productive labor). Hasn't supervisory labour changed a lot since Marx's
time, and wouldn't it be true to say that supervisory labour these days
performs much more productive labour contributing directly to the actual
creation of output of use-values offered for sale, at the very least at the
lower levels ?

Question 2: If the average RP in the sphere of circulation (trade in
commodity capital, money capital, financial claims and non-production
assets) is higher than in the sphere of production mapped in social accounts
data, and if the total portion of investment capital existing outside the
sphere of production as financial claims or assets of some kind is very
large, or even larger that the portion of investment capital tied up in the
sphere of production itself, aren't we getting a one-sided picture by
focusing only on an RP within the sphere of production of the domestic
economy, to the extent that this profit rate pertains only to the new value
product, but not to the distribution of conserved value ? (I am talking here
about the ratio of annual net additions to fixed assets plus average
inventory holdings to total annual expenditure on net capital investment in
assets of any kind in the domestic economy). What would be the proportion of
net P receipts from overseas, of total P for the domestic economy ?

Question 3: How can we really make sense of the average "value" RP, without
comparing it to the pre-tax and post-tax annual RP on stockholders equity,
and the pre-tax and post-tax annual average RP on total assets, at least for
publicly listed companies, which show the real earnings receipts by
government and private investors ? What is the real discrepancy between the
trend-movement  in SNA-type "operating surplus" and your S aggregate ?

Question 4: What is the real accumulation pattern of realised S, i.e. what
is the rate of reinvestment of total realised S, and what are the
proportions of reinvested S applying to different asset types and different
sectors ? Can we validly say, for example, that an increasing fraction of
realised gross P included in new value added is not re-invested in
production at all ?

Question 5: what is the statistical relationship between the labour force
participation rate of workers included in Uf , and the value product per
productive worker ?

Question 6: in your opinion, what is a correct Marxian concept of
"productivity", if, contrary to the view of the US Department of Commerce,
property does not "create" income itself, and only labour does ? Would you
accept Prof. Michel Husson's argument  about the OCC, that an identity
between a rising TCC and a rising VCC cannot be posited as a general rule,
given that, if S/V is constant, the OCC increases only if the TCC grows more
quickly than the productivity of labour ?

Question 7: how significant is the quantitative effect of deflation on RP,
given that price inflation reduces total RP in real terms ?

Question 8: in the post-war period, do you consider that the relationship
between the average rate of interest and the average RP stays the same, or
that it has changed ?

Jurriaan