RE FROP. I don't think this should be regarded as part of Marx's theory.
> It is only mentioned in Volume 3 of Capital, which was the earliest of
> the three volumes to be published and he never got around to revising
> it. As published, it contains innumerable revisions by Engels, and while
> I love Engels, he didn't, at least in his final years when he edited
> Vol. 3, wholly understand Marx. The rate of profit may or may not be
> falling in any particular< period, but an argument that it is should not
> depend on C3 for its theoretical basis.
>
> Also, Vol. 3 as a whole does not deal with any of the fundamental
> features of capitalism but rather focuses on the manifestation of those
> fundamental eatures in surface form. All in all, C3 should be used with
> great caution and with a grain of salt.
>
I don't know, a lot of the best stuff in Capital is in Vol III... competition, prices and especially banking, finance and world money, as well as concrete empirical stuff on actual crises. The fact that it's far from finished is in my view a plus as it breaks any tendency to treat Capital as some kind of Bible. I don't think we can seriously treat finance, or prices for that matter, as mere surface manifestations of things wholly determined 'below' them.
The falling-rate-of-profit section is among the least interesting parts of the volume though and has been subsequently blown way out of proportion.
By the way, though what appears in what became Vol III was drafted before the published version of Vol I, it wasn't actually published until much later.
Mike Beggs