Long-term developments – underconsumption, stagnation, long waves and financialisation

It was seen in Chapter 6 that the so-called tendential fall in the average (or general) rate of profits, attributed to the increasing replacement of labour with capital, provides (to say the least) insufficient and probably no explanation whatsoever for the long-run developments in capitalism. Hence, it also offers an inadequate explanation for the prolonged period of economic stagnation that the capitalist industrialised countries have been experiencing since the first half of the 1970s.