O capital nos EUA: um estudo sobre a tendência da taxa de lucro americana (1945 – 2010)

Abstract

The objective of this dissertation is to study the behavior of the American profit rate from the Post-World War II until the first decade of the 21st century. For this, the study is divided into two parts; theoretical and empirical. The first part consists of a redemption of the Marxist theory regarding the Law of downward trend in the rate of profits. This theoretical rescue is made throughout the first chapter, encompassing and discussing themes that influence and are influenced by the variations in profit rates, as well as counter-factors that act in response to the limiting behavior of capital accumulation represented by the downward trend profit rates. In the following chapters an analytical exposition on the history of the American economy from the Post-Second War until the end of the first decade of the 21st century is presented. Chapter II presents an analysis of the North American economy during the so-called golden years of the world economy. The way in which capital adapts, through counter-trends, according to the dynamics of profit rates, is the modifying factor of the system, which performs metamorphoses as the tendency and the counteracting forces interact. The opening up of trade and the initiative to rebuild European countries and Japan, go from means of combating the downward trend to a factor of increasing competitiveness in the international market, which reinforces the structural tendency of falling profit rates; and these factors led to the end of the Wellfare State as early as the 1970s, in response to the downward trend in profit rates. In chapter III the study is carried out from the 1980s to 2010, where we see the fight against the trend being carried out in different ways over the years; despite always striving to keep real wage growth down, increasingly depressing aggregate demand, increasing dependence on foreign trade. In the 1980s, the indebtedness of companies to carry out merger and acquisition processes was the main strategy. In the following decade, indebtedness grew even more, but in order to increase productivity in view of competition from international markets. In the 2000s, speculative capital, which since the 1980s had been financing counterpart strategies, reached the highest level of economic irresponsibility, which reverberates in the 2008 crisis. Throughout these years, with the dialectical struggle between tendency and counter-tendencies dictating the metamorphoses of American capitalism, we see the transformations of the system as the result of this struggle.