Because Roberts fails to analyse these different types of accumulation, at different periods of the cycle, he fails to understand the difference between cyclical falls in the rate of profit, followed by rises in the rate of profit, resulting from changes in the value composition, as against a long-term fall in the rate of profit resulting from a structural shift in the technical/organic composition.
If we take the approximately 50 year period of the long wave cycle, then assume in Cycle 1, we start from a period of boom, in which labour supplies are still adequate, but are starting to become depleted, followed by a period of crisis, in which wages rise, squeezing profits so that capital is overproduced. Taken as a whole, over the 25 years of this period, the average rate of profit is, say, 30%. Capital responds to this condition of labour shortages, by engaging in a technical revolution. Labour is shaken out, a relative surplus population is created, and the value of labour-power falls, causing wages to fall, and the rate of surplus value to rise. That causes the rate of profit to rise. At the same time, these technological changes bring about a moral depreciation of the fixed capital stock, and rising productivity also reduces the unit value of raw materials, so that the value composition of capital falls, again causing the rate of profit to rise. The average rate of profit over this 25 year period, therefore, rises to, say, 50%.
This, results in lower interest rates (because the supply of loanable money capital from realised profits rises relative to the demand for it for capital accumulation, and lower rents – because the industrial rate of profit rises relative to the agricultural rate of profit – and this was what was seen in the 1980's, and 90's. The average rate of profit over the whole cycle is then 40%. As Marx also demonstrates in the first period, gross output rises faster than net output, and in the second period net output rises faster than gross output, and its this fact, which is the real basis of the falling interest rates, in the second period, and rising interest rates in he first period.
In the following cycle, precisely because the technological development from the previous cycle has brought about a rise in social productivity, and a rise in the technical/organic composition of capital, the conditions exist for the operation of The Law of the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall as a secular long-term trend. As the economy moves again into the period of boom followed by crisis, the same pattern emerges, but, now, the average rate of profit during this period may be, say, 28%, rather than 30%, (and compared to the 50% in the latter period of the first cycle), and in the second period is, say, 48% rather than 50%, but is still higher than during the period of boom and crisis. Overall, the average for this second cycle falls to 38%, compared to the 40% over the whole of the first cycle, reflecting the effect of The Law of the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall as a long-term trend. But, again, its clear from this that The Law of the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall is not a cause of crises, but is itself a consequence of them.
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