10 Comments

Excellent stuff here. In particular, this idea that "the felt need to jump from an evident change in capitalism to a claim about the end of capitalism reflects this lingering hostility to the idea of epochal changes within the history of capitalism."

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Ideal response to that obstacle course of an article, which as you say shared its holes with too much left thinking about Fed rates.

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To get the best of both worlds, why not combining easy money (to help entrepreneurs) with higher taxes on wealth (to punish rent extractors)?

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This is great, Tim. I found B & R's article bewildering and think this critique is spot on. Another very basic point of carelessness in their portrayal of the political economy of the "golden age" really jumped out at me. In the first graf of thesis 1, they write: "In the US, this produced significant electoral swings, and big congressional majorities for the winning side: Eisenhower in 1956, Johnson in 1964, Nixon in 1972." Neither Eisenhower or Nixon won congressional majorities in those elections, let alone big ones; in fact Dems held both the House & the Senate both times!

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Spitting 🔥🔥🔥.

The "return to feudalism" or "the progressive wing of bourgeoisie is overcoming feudalism" canard are very old and Amadeo Bordiga did a good job of demolishing it.

The phenomenon which is characterized as feudalism - enormous concentration of production units - is a product of super-capitalism where socialisation of production has reached extremely high levels propelled by the logic of value and political requirements (competitiveness on world market against similarly gigantic concentrations of capital) and would be technically impossible under any preceding mode of production.

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Great point about the overlap between Brenner and a lot of the crony capitalism literature. The task is not to figure out what elements are capitalism and which ones are not (or, in their temporal framing: pre-capitalist relics or post-capitalist horizons) but rather to think about how and at what level the relationships between those elements are constituted in something that obviously amounts to capitalism.

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Good piece! Think the link in the first paragraph is wrong

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I will have to go and look at the newest NLR piece from Brenner Riley, but I really y appreciate barkers reorientation to of the argument to real social production, this is, let's face it, the root of all value.

even if you are a marginalist, you still put all your faith in what? where do you put your faith?? oh what? oh... in the market!!! the place where humans trade their surplus for what is scarce to them.

for the record: labor/productivity are more or less the same. the problem is that all of human reproduction is not accounted for in capitalist models. it's why I;m sympathetic to degrowth, because they want to revolutionize the models and destroy profits.

what else is there?/

excellent piece barker,

"Given the structure of contemporary American capitalism, much of what our hypothetical crony would consume would be services, a sector in which profits can famously be wrung out of workers without much investment in plant and equipment. In the NLR piece, there is hardly any sense that this dominant sector even exists."

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