From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Sun Mar 05 2006 - 08:23:27 EST
The falling rate of profit is science fiction, if there is no scientific investigation of the theorem of the falling rate of profit. Just quickly, I have provided a brief answer to some of your queries here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit_to_fall Empirical sources for profitability data in price terms are: -business accounts -tax reports - national accounts -anecdotal information and circumstantial evidence -indirect information (e.g. business closures and business expansion) - independently constructed estimates From these you can obtain a picture of the historical trend, assuming that the methodology for obtaining data remains relatively constant over time. The difficulty these days is, that you have corporations with a sales turnover larger than whole countries, with a system of internal transactions which is often international. This gives rise to very complex accounting systems which may overstate or understate profits and capital stocks to avoid or evade tax, with significant quantitative consequences. Consequently, profit data in price terms are always open to interpretation, and various different sources have to be put side by side to obtain an indication of the real trend. A distinction must be drawn between conjunctural fluctuations, longer term fluctuations, and the broad long-run historical trend. The difficulty with measuring the last-mentioned trend is that statistical classifications and accounting methods have changed, through two centuries of industrial capitalism. A further distinction should be drawn between empirical research and empiricism. In empirical research, there are rarely "perfect data" or "perfect measurements". Often we can obtain only approximations. But according to empiricism, unless we can observe and measure something with exactitude, no knowledge or science is possible, and indeed knowledge itself is held to be reducible to sense data. We should not, however, conflate data with the phenomena they aim to describe, with varying degrees of exactitude. Theory consists of systematic, coherent generalisations from experience which are not reducible to particular experiences; at any time, knowledge contains both theory and experience. One of the main quantitative problems for estimating a Marxian rate of profit concerns the conceptual interpretation of financial imposts associated with so-called "unproductive labour", which on some definitions comprise half, or more than half of total labour costs in advanced capitalist societies. Some Marxists interpret them as capital costs, others as a component of surplus-value, yet others exclude them from consideration.(See also my article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_product and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensation_of_employees on this). Postmodernists are people who like to show off their skill at "interpreting" phenomena with a sophisticated array of layers of meaning, without doing any systematic empirical research themselves; rather, they like to cream off the scientific research of others, and refashion it into a new concoction that they find satisfying. Sometimes this yields genuinely new insights, but often it is merely a shallow rehash. Undoubtedly, reporting on empirical research involves telling a story, but postmodernism usually has only the story, not the research, it is more a sort of "art" to show off your erudition (or ability to make semantic associations). Research to obtain an objective view takes hard work, subjective interpretation can be quick as a flash, and change according to what one finds meaningful at the time. One reason why Marxism has virtually disappeared as an intellectual discipline, is because most remaining Marxists (bar a few notable exceptions) do no comprehensive empirical research anymore to discipline their abstractions, for one reason or another. Consequently, there is a bigger and bigger chasm between real capitalism and the capitalism Marxists prattle about - any abstraction is as good as any other abstraction, because they are not disciplined by empirical investigation, and that contributes to postmodernist relativism and subjectivism. In the end, we are left not with an active human subject armed with objective knowledge grounded in experience, but with a passive postmodern interpreter of the Zeitgeist, skeptical of his ability to know anything more, than what happens to be in front of his nose. This is the paradox of our epoch - at the very time that more valid data is available than ever, fewer people are actually researching it. Jurriaan
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