Paul didn't say Marx's theoretical account contradicts empirical reality; it contradicts the *account* of empirical reality held by participants caught up in market relations. The relation between essence and appearance is quite a difficult one. That labor value can only be represented by price, though price necessarily misrepresents labor value, suggests here that essence can only appear as other than itself. That such a Hegelian logic of essence applies to bourgeois relations is part of Marx's critique of those relations. Patrick Murray develops this argument at length.
Mattick Jr agrees with you that Marx had no interest in the explanation of relative prices. Indeed while agreeing with Leswak Nowak that Marx's theory has the same idealized form as Galilean physics and thus cannot directly account for observable phenomena, he disagrees that Marx hoped that through the relaxation of simplfying assumptions he could explain relative prices.
It does seem to me that value added in mfg could be used as a very rough proxy for the rate of exploitation--though again the use of credit instruments may enable an artificial maintainence of the price level and therewith profitability and such national statistics will hide the international transfer of value.
You suggest the argument that capitalism is at its strongest point today. But since accumulation has a built in tendency to raise the real wage--as Paolo Giusanni has shown in the International Journal of Political Economy--the stagnation of real wages over the last 25 years would suggest that the system has yet to exit from a period of instability.
You place your confidence in the supercession of capitalism on 1. revolutionary class struggle and 2. the historic limits of previous modes of production (no social form lasts forever). As for 1., revolutionary class struggle can only develop in and requires for its success a certain objective weakening of the social order. 2 however is simply to argue by analogy: that since previous modes have met their death, so will capital. By not providing a theory of the objective developmental tendencies by which capital reaches its limits, you have indeed succumbed to the despair about the end of history and so forth, no matter how much you may attempt to disguise it with rhetorical flourishes about the revolutionary class struggle.
Mattick's theory of the limits of the mixed economy may be one of many. But the profit squeeze argument is a weak one to the extent that 1. it masks that upward pressure on the OCC, along with an incline in the ratio of U to P labor, brought the profit rate down, not excessive direct or social wage demands and 2. it cannot explain the weakness of accumulation since the wage squeeze has been reversed.
As for Brenner's theory some have argued here that the kind of overproduction he theorizes would be susceptible to keynesian remedies.
The collapse of the USSR may prove that the welfare state was an artefact of the Cold War, as Gingrich put it. But again the fiscal card having already been played, there are now real limits on what govts can do in the context of a real downturn.
As for the meaning of crisis, I refer to the Mattick Jr passage on world market crises which I typed in several months ago. He reserved the term for those crises that could *not* be overcome simply by the redistribution of surplus value due to disproportionality or underconsumption difficulties. World market crises can only be overcome by the production of additional surplus value. But the set of questions you raise are most important.
Yours, rakesh
> The problem I've always had with the concept of crisis is; a crisis for who?
> Sure the Mexican peso crisis and the Asian crisis may be over from the point of
> view of the investor classes but these crisis' are very much intact for the
> millions who lost their jobs and have seen their purchasing power halved. The
> word "crisis" means different things for different classes. "Crisis" is a kind
> of indexical; it has different referents depending on its usage. As I
> understand it, the SSA approach is an attempt to explain why capitalism does not
> go into crisis. But for those who work long hours for very little, capitalism is
> always in crisis. Or am I just confusing the macro sense of crisis with the
> micro sense of the word? If Marx's theory of crisis cannot predict particular
> instances of crisis, what use is it?Sure, the world economy always tends toward
> crisis, but you only have to read the daily newspaper to see that. The more you
> critique bourgeois ideology the stronger it gets. The more crisis there are, the
> better the bourgeoise gets at managing them(i.e. shifting the costs on to the
> working class and the poor), both politically and economically.The crisis theory
> may explain in hindsight, but its predictive power is minimal, which still gives
> it an edge over its competitors e.g. neo-classicism which have no predictive
> and no explanatory power.