Ted Winslow <egwinslow at rogers.com>
However, these results are themselves reached by means of what seems to me to be mistaken reasoning. The argument claiming to demonstrate a tendency of the rate of profit to fall, for instance, is not persuasive. Putting aside the question as to whether it requires an arbitrary assumption about future changes in technology, it's an instance of Marx falling victim to the Ricardian vice, an attempt to reach conclusions about the the long-run future by means of a long chain of deductive reasoning from fixed axioms. For reasons I've pointed to before, this is in invalid form of reasoning where, as in the case of social phenomena and as Marx himself assumes, internal relations are insufficiently stable to satisfy the presuppositions which its valid application requires.
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CB: How is it that Marx's argument on the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is concerning the long-run future ? It is an ever present tendency given the basic logic of capital ( with ever present countervailing tendencies) , not a prediction that in the long run future the rate of profit will lower than at the present.