The Dynamics of Manufacturing-Sector Profit Rates in Seven Industrialized Countries

With a focus on the manufacturing sector across some member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the rate of surplus value and the rate of profit are broken down into analytical components to help understand what has produced their differences among the industrialized countries during the past thirty years. In so doing, the paper illuminates the relationship between the conventional, flow, and political-economy rate of profit. It concludes that the rate of surplus value plays a significant role—to a similar degree across the countries—in determining the profit-rate growth, but capitalist methods to extract surplus value from productive labor vary greatly from country to country, which implies that capitalist means and procedures are produced in a highly complex way by country-specific social, political, economic, and cultural processes.