Seth Ackerman 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.
^^^^^ CB: Why not ? If these are actually the things that make profits go up and down it's as important for political economy as what makes temperatures go up and down is to meterology. May not be that interesting to you , but that doesn't make it not scientifically important. Not everything important in intellectual endeavors is interesting.
^^^^^
In the Grundrisse, Marx says this about the law of FROP (and he does call it a "law," not a "tendency"):
^^^^ CB: The socalled Grundisse was not published. It's sort of like reading rough, personal notes. When it was published, fully thought out and deliberated upon for precision, it is called the "law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.
Anyway, have you checked out actual jurisprudential _laws_ ? They actualize as tendencies,i.e. laws are broken by countervailing "tendencies" known as criminals and other "defendants".
^^^^
> 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.
^^^^^ CB: See the penultimate chapter of _Capital_ for a more specific and polished statement heralding the end.