>Why has not capital accumulation taken off despite the beat back of labor?
>Marx's theory provides one answer.
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Marx said there is a secular and ultimately irreversible tendency for the profit rate to fall towards zero. This will bring about capaitalism's demise. That's a major claim, which is why the theory has attracted so much attention. Marx's theory did *not* say "sometimes accumulation will be sluggish." If that had been his theory, nobody would ever have given a damn.
Most of the people - maybe all of the people - who work on this topic wouldn't care about it if it were not associated with the prediction that capitalism will inevitably meet its demise. So it's a bit of a bait-and-switch to turn around and point to temporary lulls in accumulation or occasional patches of disappointing profits as evidence that the theory has merit. It is simply not a theory about how profits go through temporary lulls or patches of sluggishness. It's about the ultimate end to capitalism. If the theory is valid we would have two hundred years of statistical evidence showing the vector of profit rates headed to zero. There is no such evidence.
Capital accumulation is doing fine. The evidence that it's on its last legs exists nowhere.
Seth