From: Anders Ekeland (anders.ekeland@ONLINE.NO)
Date: Wed Oct 31 2007 - 03:25:49 EDT
At 23:56 30.10.2007, you wrote: > > > > Just to mention one stylised fact: The profit rates achieved after > > the enormous destruction of physical capital (and the switch from > > elite to mass consumption of cars, electrical articles, chemical > > products etc.) that we saw in the decades after the II WW - will be > > hard to repeat. That profit rates will be temporarily restored when > > the workers movement suffers defeats - f.ex. by the neo-liberal > > offensive - point again to the cyclical nature of the accumulation > > process which the tendency of the profit rate fall in an > > *organic/endogenous* interplay with the counteracting tendencies creates. > >But Anders labor is flat on its back in the US. The NRLB has been fully >captured, unit labor costs have fallen, workers can be fired without >cause, employers coerce workers with threat of relocation or part time >work without medical benefits if they don't accept reduced wages, overtime >hours are shaved all the time...yet productive investment in the US is >stagnant. But that's no wonder Rakesh - a defeat for the workers movement also means insufficient aggregate demand - when the possibility of stimulating investment by lending is exhausted - like it more and more seem to be. Capitalist dynamics are not a simple system cause and effect, it is a multitude of contradictory and related mechanisms, the tendency of profit rates to decline is one of them. If my memory does not fail me - as it did when I wrote Meek instead of Dobb - there is a theorem that says that three deterministic difference equations is enough to create a path with no clear pattern inside some rather wide boundaries. On top of that you have conscious players trying to do arbitrage, make policy, defend their interests - so the macro result of all this micro behavior becomes very hard - but not entirely impossible to predict. But it is like weather forecasting - a lot of non-linear processes makes this still a difficult sport more than a couple of days ahead - sometimes not even that is possible, when there is a lot of movement (wind). Regards Anders
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