ABSTRACT
The last couple of decennia have seen dramatic changes in capitalism: The brutal reaffirmation by capital of its power over labor, the enhanced importance of finance capital as a consequence of the increasingly deeper difficulties of productive capital, and the reassertion of capital’s rule over the whole world, also called globalization, after the fall of the Soviet Union. This has led some authors to believe that these changes have ushered in a new phase of capitalist development in which the law of the tendential fall of the profit rate (from now on, the Law) has ceased operating. Other authors have submitted that “monopoly capitalism” has marked the demise of the Law. Yet other authors believe that a fusion of Marx and Keynes is not only possible but also desirable as an alternative to the Law. This chapter argues for the persistent theoretical and empirical validity of the Law as the unsurpassed theory of crises in modern capitalism.
