Abstract
Marxian economics has been dealing extensively with the issue of falling profitability and its connection with financialisation. One finds in this line of research contributions linking ...financialisation with the list of counter-elements to the Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall, with financialisation being interpreted as the ‘sixth’. In the past, various authors have either briefly commented on the ‘sixth’ factor or left it aside. We aim to provide an alternative interpretation, based on three elements. First, the role of joint-stock companies’ issuance of long-term financing instruments yielding low remuneration. Second, the fact that sectors such as railways and public utilities, belonging to the category of natural monopolies, are excluded from gravitation towards an average rate of profit. Third, the role of the organic composition of capital in determining differences in sectoral profitability. Therefore, we claim that the sixth element should be read as a reference to natural monopolies remaining outside the field of profit rate equalisation.
The author examines consequences of expansion strategies of commercial network media, and compares them to ideals of open and accessible public communication. These strategies level out the falling ...rates of profits that the increased productivity of labour is bringing. Counter-measures of media industries manipulate the amounts of variable and constant capital (outsourcing of labour, shifting of depreciation costs on users, and specialisation). These processes, which are specific to platform business models, ultimately give rise to fragmentation, individualisation and ideological homogenisation of the peripheral public. The public becomes ideologically similar to the centres of power, whereas its critical potential and, consequently, its effective political freedom decreases. While both the political and the economic subsystems and the public alike use network communication to organise their activities, interaction between the two social domains (the system and the lifeworld) resembles an ‘interactive top-down communication structure’. Inclusion of citizens-consumers into the productivity race renders interactivity similar to one-way communication.
This article develops a novel micro-approach for the empirical evaluation of Marx's law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Contrary to the traditional method which uses national ...macroeconomic data, this approach utilises data taken directly from company reports and accounts. The principal advantage of this approach is that it provides an accurate measurement of the value composition of capital, devoid of the measurement limitations of the traditional method regarding variable capital which stem from the inability to distinguish productive from unproductive labour. A disadvantage, however, is that this approach does not cover the entire national economy. The application of the proposed micro-approach to the ongoing Greek crisis yields results which are congruent with the traditional method and reinforce other recent studies linking the current crisis with low profitability.
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