1. Doug has suggested a stable or declining capital-output ratio may be attributed to the inducement offered by low wages to use labor instead of capital; this would then counteract increased upward pressure on the OCC and may explain the recovery of profits. 2. Others, from Frank (not Mike) Taussig to Blaug, have suggested that the ratio may remain stable because more powerful or longer lasting machines, however much greater their initital price , transmit less constant capital per unit of output, thus stabilizing or even boosting the output-capital labor ratio and dooming Marxian dynamics. Andrew suggests that as unit values are brought down by innovators in command of such capital-saving innovations, the old capital may be violently devalued, actually leading to falling profitability overall while I have suggested that such longer lasting or more powerful machines, though themselves potentially serving as a counter tendency to the falling rate of profit in indeed reducing the constant capital required per unit, may themselves have been ever more capital using in their own construction and thus require for their purchase a sum of surplus value not freely available to capitalists whose value is tied up in very expensive long life capital and only slowly amortized/amassed in the requisite sum for capital accumulation. 3. Brenner himself suggests that employers have tended to purchase greater output through the simple and brutal intensification of labor, along with the scrapping of obsoloscent plants, more than through the kind of recapitalization of production which could put upward pressure on the OCC as potentially reflected in an inclining capital labor ratio. Of course the slowing down in the rate of new accumulation itself then needs to be explained. It could be a case of the "the contradictory movement immanent in value production, namely the increase of surplus value and the decline in the rate of profit, resolving itself--in time--as a decline in the rate of accumulation and finally in the objective impossibility of extracting from shrinking variable capital component of capital the quantities of surplus value required for its further profitable expansion." (Mattick, Last Refuge of the Bourgeoise, p. 91)
best, rakesh