>This issue of semi-monopolies on a world scale as well as within one
>country or one sector, fits with a model of the law of value operating as a
>sort of *field* which, like the gravitational field, varies in strength in
>different circumstances, different locations, and different contexts
>depending on the presences of other masses in the vicinity.
Hi Chris B, are you implicitly referring to a book by a E Farjoun and M Machover, Laws of Chaos: A Probablistic Account of Political Economy? There's a brief account of this probabilistic, "non deterministic" approach to prices and unequal profit rates in MC Howard and JE King, A History of Marxian Economics, vol II (1929-90).
Let me refer to that quote from Marx's speech on free trade which is included as an appendix to the English translation of The Poverty of Philosophy:
"One other thing must never be forgotten, namely, that, just as everything has become a monopoly, there are also nowadays some branches of industry which dominate all the others, and secure to the nations which most largely cultivate them the command of the world market."
I just received the latest issue of Historical Materialism in which several criticisms of Brenner are presented (have only read Carchedi's and Moseley's so far). Yet from a skim not one of the authors takes up systematically Brenner's explanation for the recovery of the US profit rate. Moseley attempts to explain why there has not been a full recovery despite wage repression. He argues that continuing upward pressure on the OCC, plus persistent incline in unproductive to productive labor ratio, still depresses profit rate. That's why higher rate of exploitation in itself has not restored fully profit rate
Yet he grants that on line buying may so reduce unproductive circulation labor that US profitability could soar on the basis of the internet!
Yet even without such a boon, I get no sense from his analysis that US capitalism could not sit pretty with the rate of profit it has already achieved.
Brenner of course pinpoints wage repression and post Plaza dollar devaluation. Yet as Galbraith has shown, no US industry that has recovered and strengthened its export position has done so on the basis of lower wages (Moseley seems to agree with Brenner on importance of wage repression but neither provides any evidence that it can indeed explain the magnitude of US profit rate rise or recovery of export strength), and US mfg profitability seem not to have been hurt much by post 95 dollar rise. Important here may have been the elimination of whole industries (or at least important segements of them) that would have been hurt and left with excess capacity by a rising dollar.
It seems to me that the recovery of US profitability (I think Callincos argues that Brenner has exaggerated it) has in some large part been due in Schumpeterian fashion to the US cornering of technology monopolies either in radical new means of production or products. That is, the US has cleaned its industrial structure out and focused on cultivating those relatively high paying industries which allow command of the global market. Brenner underestimates how much exit there has been and how much successful entry into the most important lines or branches (and the crucial subsets of them) there has been by US capital.
In short, the monopoly profits that Brenner thinks US mfg enjoyed while Germany and Japan had not yet developed their low cost capacity to sufficient strength to attack the global market has been again secured through Schumpeterian-Galbraithian technological monopolies, which may be more short lived and precarious than monopoly by defacto protection from foreign competition but no less profitable. Moreover, these tech monopolies probably employ or need relatively smaller armies of unproductive circulation labor that would depress the profit rate as well.
This of course leads to the point we are both making--profit rates of nations cannot be understood outside of the context of the global economy and industrial position in the international division of labor. We also know that the inflow of foreign money in the US has lowered interest rates and helped US profitability as well. Which is to say nothing of cheap foreign imports.
So I just don't understand this interest with national profit rates among the new quantitative Marxists. Carchedi alone puts the whole enterprise into question, and I think he is correct.
However, it is certain that many will not find his criticism of the Okishio Theorem persuasive because it abstracts by means of an arbitrary methodological device (TSS) from the beneficial profitabilty effects technological innovations have on the industries that use them as inputs, though the average profit rate in the innovator's branch may suffer since laggard firms can't keep up.
Yours, Rakesh