On Nov 27, 2007, at 12:35 PM, Eric wrote:
>> Yeah. Countervailing tendencies. Increased exploitation, cheapening
>> of capital goods, foreign trade, growth in stock capital. It's mostly
>> worked, at least until now.
>
> Yes. This is more or less Deleuze and Guattari's reading of Marx's
> FROP, in Anti-Oedipus, which is why it is superior to the work of a
> thousand and one econobots. They saw the FROP as the expression of
> capital's endless ability to go beyond its own limits, to set new
> limits that it must again surpass. "What capital deterritorializes
> with one hand it axiomatizes with the other."
>
> It's funny that a couple of alleged postmodern aesthetes saw capital
> in a clearer light than most Marx-imitating political economists.
The weird thing is that the chapter on countervailing tendencies is right there, after FROP.
<http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch14.htm>
> If we consider the enormous development of the productive forces of
> social labour in the last 30 years alone as compared with all
> preceding periods; if we consider, in particular, the enormous mass
> of fixed capital, aside from the actual machinery, which goes into
> the process of social production as a whole, then the difficulty
> which has hitherto troubled the economist, namely to explain the
> falling rate of profit, gives place to its opposite, namely to
> explain why this fall is not greater and more rapid. There must be
> some counteracting influences at work, which cross and annul the
> effect of the general law, and which give it merely the
> characteristic of a tendency, for which reason we have referred to
> the fall of the general rate of profit as a tendency to fall.