Here is another interesting blog that’s been out only for a year: http://www.permanentrevolution.net/entry/3388

Link references a very incisive critique of Andrew Kliman’s most recent book. Most interesting and relevent for the purposes of USofM was this, from an author (“Bill J.”) comment tagged on after the main article:

“Kliman’s worst mistake, is his conflation of tax revenues with the mass of profit, that means he grossly overestimates the mass of profit and therefore, the rate of profit.”

Bill J. critiqued this a bit more fully in the article. The conflation is fundamentally categorical, and not simply due to the failure to recognize that a part of tax revenues constitute the social wage. Tax revenues can also constitute capitalist profits, as in war expenditures – here Bill J. makes a rare error, as war expenditures can contribute to capital accumulation, they simply do not contribute to the *expanded reproduction* of capital, as military hardware are not means of production, indeed they are means of destruction. Mandel basically had it right here in Late Capitalism, though whether or not this constitutes a “Department III” is open to question, especially when we turn to a proper consideration of the role of rent in capitalism.

On that, of course, Bill J. says little, and that absence in an otherwise excellent commentary is telling evidence of USofM’s raison d’etre. For as I stated in the article, rents, like taxes, are a form of tribute, and likewise can fall on either side of the profits/wages ledger, as either a surplus profit or a surplus wage, a wage paid above the value of labor power – the historic condition of the U.S. working class coming out of the 19th century. Or these are paid out to a third party, a rent-collecting capitalist – the true “rentier”. Of course this all needs to be demonstrated empirically, but the point of a research project is to lay out what exactly needs demonstration.

If it is true that it is an error to inflate the mass and rate of profits by inclusion of tax revenues, is is also true in the case of rents received, for both taxes and rents are both distributions out of the total mass of surplus value, not profits of enterprise. To arrive at an accurate measure of the real rate of profit at the point of production at any given point of time, rents actually paid out must also be factored out.