As “leis férreas” e o determinismo:

ainda o caso da lei da queda tendencial da taxa de lucro

Abstract

This paper addresses contemporary interpretations of the emphasis Marx gave, in his critique of political economy, to the laws of movement, laws that work with “iron necessity”. We discuss the interpretation that attributes to Marx a “unilinear determinism”, trying to demonstrate that the laws enunciated by the author of Capital are neither predictive nor external, on the contrary, they are relational laws that reveal internal nexuses, they are laws of tendency. We use as an example the law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit, which plays a particularly relevant place from the point of view of exposition, as it reveals, in a more concrete way, the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. We argue that the emphasis on the “iron” character of these laws is not due to any ambition to determine, a priori, the movement of history, but to expose what is distinctive of the production based on the logic of capital.