[lbo-talk] Marx on profit

[Seth Ackerman]

bhandari at berkeley.edu wrote:

>Why has not capital accumulation taken off despite the beat back of labor?
>Marx's theory provides one answer. 
>  
>

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