thank you for another illuminating post.
There does seem to be a great of mass of SV that it is not profitable to capitalise--Doug has a great and very important discussion of this on pp269ff of his book. Whether the reason for this non capitalisation of SV is the profitability concerns of monpolies, the power of rentiers to require only pornographic rates of return on new real investment, underconsumptionist problems or falling profitability in new production due to the relative expulsion of variable capital (and it could be any combination), that mass of uncapitalised SV has led to an explosion of high rentier consumption and speculative financial activity.
On another topic, any analysis that illuminates the dynamics of centralisation will win attention--you will notice Foster's very important critique of Brenner for neglect here.
According to disciple Richard Langlois, Chandler saw the wave of conglomerate diversification in the 60s as in effect an internal capital market that invests in a diversified portfolio of unrelated interests. Though the stock market is better at diversifying away risk, Chandler argued that inflation had led to such price distortion that managers having found it impossible to disentangle changes in relative prices from changes in the price level found the internal information and control within a conglomerate to then have overall advantages.
Chandler then feared as inflation subsided in the 80s that the break up of conglomerates would create a market for corporate control and the havoc of deal making would lead to an emphasis away from long term profit making.
Yet inflation remains in check and we have seen perhaps an unprecedented wave of mergers and acquisitions. It seems to me that the main form has not been conglomerate diversification but within industry centralisation. In the case of transnational mergers perhaps the motive is to circumvent protectionist legislation. In the case of within country mergers, perhaps the motive is to avoid competitive investments and greater excess capacity. I am not quite sure, but we do need an analysis of the dynamics of the centralisation of capital over time, no?
Yours, Rakesh