[p2p-research] Can Marxian Economics Explain the Crisis?

[Michel Bauwens]

hi kevin,

have you followed brenner/aglietta, I find them very fruitful, without the
need to fully agree,

unlike Ryan, though I'm critical of the marxist legacy, I still think it is
vastly superior, because of its attention to the underlying class dynamics,
than any other relative approach,

it's practically impossible to understand any country's evolution and
politics, without this attention; where marxism would become 'dangerous', is
by applying these insights in a monological way; by contrast, an integral
approach combing the fullness of (inter)objective and (inter)subjective
factors, would avoid any determinist tendency

Michel

On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 12:03 PM, Kevin Carson <
free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 1/7/10, Ryan <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > John Quiggin wonders if anyone has constructed "a distinctively Marxian
> analysis of the current  crisis":
> >   Marxian economics MIA?, by John Quiggin: The financial crisis has,
>  justifiably, enhanced the reputation of Karl Marx as an economic thinker.
> Marx  was the first economist to treat crises and panics as an inherent
> feature of  capitalism rather than as an inexplicable, but fortunately
> temporary, departures  from a natural equilibrium.
> >  Unfortunately, most of his analytical effort, and even more, that of the
> school  of thought that followed him, was devoted to pointless exercises in
> value  theory[1]. Marx’s discussion of crisis rested mainly on the idea of
> the falling  rate of profit which seemed at the time to be both a
> theoretical inevitability  and an observable trend. But with technological
> progress, there’s no necessity  for the rate of profit to fall consistently,
> and it hasn’t. There are other  ideas in Marx that might be developed to
> yield a better theory of crisis, but  nothing resembling a systematic
> theory.
> >
>
> Marx himself, in vol. 3 of Capital, wrote of a number of offsetting
> tendencies to the falling direct rate of profit, which were developed
> by twentieth century Marxists (including the export of surplus
> capital, in assorted theories of imperialism by Lenin, Kautsky,
> Luxemburg, etc.).
>
> IMO the most relevant Marxist work to the present crisis is that of
> the neo-Marxists in the Monthly Review group, starting with Baran and
> Sweezy's dissection of corporate capitalism's tendency toward
> overaccumulation in Monopoly Capitalism.  More recently, Harry Magdoff
> did some great work on financialization as a remedy for growing
> surpluses, tendencies to jobless recoveries, etc., over the past
> twenty years or so.
>
> --
> Kevin Carson
> Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
> Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
> http://mutualist.blogspot.com
> Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
> http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
> Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
> http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
>
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