>That is not what Marx wrote. He said that there was a TENDENCY to fall & gave
>offsetting tendencies. Besides, later scholarship showed that Engels pushed the
>tendency harder than Marx did in the notes that made up Vols. 2 & 3.
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I don't get this. I'm no Marxologist, but you're making it sound as if Marx's theory could be summarized as "some things make profits go up, other things make profits go down." If that were actually the theory, who in hell would care? It would never have become one of the most talked-about theories about capitalism in history if that's what it were about.
In the Grundrisse, Marx says this about the law of FROP (and he does call it a "law," not a "tendency"):
> This is in every respect the most important law of modern political
> economy, and the most essential for understanding the most difficult
> relations.
A few sentences later, he explains:
> The growing incompatibility between the productive development of
> society and its hitherto existing relations of production expresses
> itself in bitter contradictions, crises, spasms. The violent
> destruction of capital not by relations external to it, but rather as
> a condition of its self- preservation, is the most striking form in
> which advice is given it to be gone and to give room to a higher state
> of social production.
This doesn't sound like an innocuous proposition about why sometimes profits rise and sometimes they fall. It heralds the end.
Seth