>Mattick did predict the limits of the mixed economy in the 60s!
So did a lot of right-wing economists.
> > and the state of the class struggle than the OCC.
>
>This is the wage squeeze theory which even your bete noire (?)Brenner
Heavens! Brenner isn't my bete noire! I have my disagreements, but please!!
>accepts through the back door:
One of my disagreements being that it deserves being admitted through the front door.
>On the other hand, Moseley is able to show a rising rate of exploitation
>throughout the postwar period even though the profit rate has never
>recovered to its circa 1950s heights. Of course Moseley would put great
>emphasis on the increasing ratio of unprod/prod labor as contributory
>factor to FROP.
But so what? The 1950s/early 1960s were an extraodinary period in economic history; have they become some kind of norm against which recent history is a disappoint exception? The U.S. economy may not be as vigorous as its publicists would argue, but it's hardly on its deathbed.
>
>I would emphasise wrenching transformations in the American industrial
>structure as important to the *American* recovery in the profit rate (as
>have been declining interest rates due to global inflow of capital), but
>then we are no longer talking about capital as a whole which is Marx's
>object. The centralisation of capital also allows a quick spike in
>profitability from the possibilities for rationalisation it opens up;
Quick? The current merger wave is almost 20 years old. That may be quick in a cosmic timescale, but it's not an eyeblink on a more human level.
>Here then profitability is maintained for some time but at the expense of
>staganation, unemployment, low rates of productivity, output and wage
>growth.
Where? In the U.S.? You don't have to be a New Economy maniac to think this isn't an accurate description of the U.S. economy today.
> Eventually this situtation will force another outbreak of
>fraticidal competition fought by the means of ever larger scale, more
>capital intensive investments.
Capitalism has always been about fratricidal competition and increasing scale. So? If FROP theory isn't - consciously or unconsciously - a theory of terminal crisis, what is it then?
Doug