[lbo-talk] Marx on profits

[Seth Ackerman]

Michael Perelman wrote:

>The way I read it is that there is a FROP.  It leads to a crisis, just like Seth 
>described.  If the crisis is not too severe, capital can come back even stronger 
>(possibly), but eventually a crisis will be so severe that we can move on to a 
>better form of society.
>  
>

1.  I don't see how this could qualify as a prediction. It's basically 
saying that the business cycle will fluctuate, for generations, with no 
clear trend. Then, one day, for no apparent reason, there *must* be a 
crisis that cannot be surmounted. Why? How could anyone know that in 
advance? It's like saying summer will follow winter year after year. 
Some will be mild, others severe. But one year, sometime in the future, 
there *must* be a winter so cold that all life will die off. What is the 
explanatory mechanism here?

2.  The most severe crisis in capitalism's history (1929-1933) brought 
forth no revolutions, except fascist ones. No socialist party in Europe, 
no matter how revolutionary in formal doctrine, was willing to venture a 
revolutionary course because it was clear that most of society was 
opposed to it. The closest the world got to international socialist 
revolution was 1917-1919, which was prompted not by an economic crisis 
but by a war that had broken out in the blush of prosperity.

3.  Real long-term tendencies *do* exist. World population has a 
long-term tendency to rise. Production per worker has a long-term 
tendency to rise. The price level, in the last century, has shown a 
long-term tendency to rise. Any child, looking at a historical chart, 
would have no trouble spotting these long-term trends. But show the 
child a chart of the profit rate over the last 200 years and he will not 
be able to make heads or tails of it. That's what I mean when I say 
there's no FROP tendency.

Seth