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capital goods industries cheapen the value of both fixed and circulating segments of
constant capital; and, increased productivity in consumer goods industries likewise
stimulates relative surplus value production since workers’ wages simultaneously
afford higher living standards so that surplus labour time increases along with the
socially necessary labour time(Norton 1988:214). But most profoundly, the average
rate of profit runs above the average of the former long-wave because firms that have
above-average productivity of labour would earn large ‘surplus profits’ since the
average productivity of labour that circumscribes the social value of commodities is
still that of the firms with the highest production costs. In other words, lowering of
the rate of profit is not wholesome or economy-wide; in fact, technological rents or
quasi-rents on proprietary technology do not engineer below-average transitional
profit rates as in all neo-classical or certain Marxist understandings of
technology(Mandel 1995:20).
An ultimate fixture of Mandel’s arguments on the ‘possibility of long waves’, the
‘possibility of crisis’, technology and surplus profits is the understanding of capitalist
economy as a system of infinitely ‘ruptured equilibrium’. That is to say, for Mandel,
history of capitalist mode of production is a ‘dialectical unity of periods of
equilibrium and periods of disequilibrium’. In this, he already infracts from most of
the Marxist routine since Marx, for whom Marx’s reproduction schemas have been the
ultimate heuristic design for an analysis of not only the capitalist economy but also for
the capitalist crisis. Reproduction schemas basically install an abstract division within
all social production -its firm-level organisation- between Department I(non-wage
commodities) and Department II(wage commodities); these two categories divide all
social labour and all social capital as well. The consequence of such an abstract
design should not be a deductive proviso on the determinate fatality of the capitalist
mode of production, inward tangibility of capitalism or a secular passage towards
monopoly capitalism despite the fact that reproduction schemes indeed consider
equilibrium as a procedural equilibrium between the two departments of production.
In other words, there is equilibrium as long as production of commodities in
Department I can salvage a monetarily effective demand for commodities in
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