Comments on: Radical Economics: A Clearer Look at Things, Part 2

By: mike

mike — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 13:05:13 +0000

Stuart,

Thanks for the kind words. It is good to hear that I make at least some sense when I talk!

By: Stuart Bramhall

Stuart Bramhall — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 07:22:37 +0000

I have just been listening to some of Mike’s radio interviews on the web. Sometimes I get an intuitive sense that I am finally hearing words for the first time that perfectly describe my sense of reality. When I hear the explanation that corporations stopped reinvesting profits sin the 1970s and started diverting them into finance, I finally understand why social programs have been steadily cut back since 1973 (to say nothing of the financial bubbles that keep bursting). Why so many of us feel like we are living with a noose around our neck that is being steadily tightened – and that we have to keep working harder and harder just to stay in one place. The economic crisis started for me long before Oct 2008. To the best of my recollection, things were never the same after Carter hiked interest rates (to 12-18%) and tightened the monetary supply in 1979

By: Jurriaan Bendien

Jurriaan Bendien — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 22:18:56 +0000

Yep, Marx DIDN’T say “less competition isn’t explicitly given by Marx as a possible reason for mitigating the fall of profit rates”. In Marx’s theory capitalist competition and capitalist monopolization always co-exist to some extent, at different levels. But really the falling tendency of the profit rate has nothing much to do with the relative intensity of competition, which could, in different situations, either raise or reduce profitability (wewould have to get very specific about what kind of competition we are talking about). Rather it has to do with the aggregate structure and size of capital investments in production relative to the income (specifically, the total surplus-value) that can be realised from them. But as I argued, even if the TPRF is a real empirical tendency, which I think it is, then if production capital in advanced capitalist economies is only about a fifth or a quarter of total physical capital assets and perhaps one-eighth of total capital assets of all kinds, the TPRF cannot by itself explain severe economic slumps. In this sense, Marxist theory has often been rather myopic and primitive. Prof. Anwar Shaikh http://homepage.newschool.edu/~AShaikh/Explaining%20the%20Global%20Economic%20Crisis.pdf explained for example how ridiculous it is for Robert Brenner to claim that what happens in the world economy is explained by what happens in US manufacturing. It’s a bit like the story of the tail wagging the dog, whereas in reality the dog wags its own tail.

By: Todd

Todd — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 02:26:22 +0000

Jurriaan said:

“Marx himself never cited ‘less competition etc’ as a countervailing tendency to the rate of profit to fall.”

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch14.htm

(While less competition isn’t explicitly given by Marx as a possible reason for mitigating the fall of profit rates, I don’t think he’d disagree with it as he demonstrated aptly capital’s natural tendency towards monopoly ie less competition.)

By: Jurriaan Bendien

Jurriaan Bendien — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 17:49:28 +0000

Oops, I forgot. In part the increase in US real GDP is of course also due to the restocking of inventories – but total inventories, which according to the estimates decreased 7 quarters in a row, must still be well below their former levels.