On Mon, Nov 26, 2007 at 10:21:41PM -0500, Seth Ackerman wrote:
> Michael Perelman wrote:
>
> >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.
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
> 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
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-- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu michaelperelman.wordpress.com