From an historical materialist perspective, the essential quality of industrial change is that it is the product of conflict resident both in the relationship of struggle between capital and labour over the accumulation of surplus value and in the competitive relations between individual capitals over the appropriation of profits. This article is essentially methodological in that it identifies the specific competitive and conflictual determinants of profitability internal to an industry and the external influences of the wider economy which contribute to that industry's ‘relative’ profitabilityvis a visinvestment capital. It argues that the emerging pattern of economic change is structured by a tendency towards crisis and declining profitability. The history of black coal production in Australia is examined in the light of this method and emerging theory of industrial reorganisat
展开▼
