> 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?
That's a good one, Doug. Maybe the FROP is one of those unconscious theories.
I offered an answer to this question yesterday. You didn't respond; you didn't say I was nuts, or mistaken, or that my points were irrelevant. Ok, that's your prerogative; noone responds to everything. But now you're back asking the same damn question, dressed up in slightly different trappings--whether or not FROP is some kind of a theory of terminal crisis. All the while claiming you're thirsting for explanations.
A glutton for punishment, I'll try again. FROP is not a theory of terminal anything. That's why Marx called it a tendency, albeit a central or "inherent " one, with clear and powerful counteracting tendencies also in play.
To briefly set out a context: Marx begins with the "original contradiction" of capitalism: the unequal labor market exchange, the contradiction between the legally "free" status of labor and its exploitation that masks the unequal social power of the classes performing the exchange and its unequal results: labor consumes its wage to reproduce itself, and capital, with its monoploy ownership of the MOP, accumulates as personal wealth the surplus value produced beyond that necessary to sustain labor. Exploitation of labor existed in other modes of production, e.g., feudalism, direct slavery, but in no other mode does it take the same form, called the value form by Marx.
Capitalism is about the extraction of surplus value on an expanding scale (M-C-M'). But increasing s/v by simple ways such as production speed-ups and longer working days quickly reach limits. Thus the major way capitalists seek to raise s/v, Marx reasoned, is through the progressive mechanization of production--mainly labor saving technology. Massive amounts of machinery were in fact introduced into production at that time.
This creates a downward pressure on profits since the base for creating surplus value, productive labor, is reduced and the value on which a return must be earned, constant capital (plant and equipment), expands. But this tendency for profit rates to fall can be counteracted by the fact that surplus value can indeed rise dramatically for several reasons (not all discussed by Marx or even existing at the time he wrote) including some (technological) production changes, Baran and Sweezy's "epoch making innovations" (automobile, etc.) which foster new industries, products, etc. Second, due to efficiencies in capital goods industries, the value (cost) of that plant and equipment doesn't rise nearly as fast as its mass, so that counteracts some of the pressure for profit rates to fall. He mentions four other counteracting causes too, as you know.
>From the idea of capital as self expanding value and the existing material
conditions, Marx developed the FROP and its counteracting tendencies. Despite
occasional statements to the contrary (remember Vol.3 was left unfinished,
completed and published by Engels) such as: "But proceeding from the nature of
the capitalist mode of production, it is thereby proved a logical necessity
that in its development the general average rate of surplus-value must express
itself in a falling general rate of profit" (chap. XIII, p.213), Marx
established no a priori proof that the rising OCC would necessarily dominate
the counteracting forces. The law of the tendency is meant as a guidepost for
marxists to use to study
Capital must expand, but conditions change and with them come new contradictions for capital and capitalism. It is up to us, then, to evaluate the forces that come to play on profit rates. Rising OCC is still a factor, but it's only one. Look around you. It is obvious that surplus value is created in different ways today, and even more obvious, it is realized in many different ways (appears in many different forms) compared to more than a century ago. Taxes and government, the growth of unproductive labor, whole unproductive industries, etc. And notice, I haven't even mentioned the class struggle (and neither did Marx much in the 3 volumes), and the effect of *that* on the laws of motion.
So let go of that crude empiricism that has you in its grip, the force that has convinced you that the FROP is some statement about the trajectory of profit rates that you can test to see if it is "correct".
RO