Hi again,
On Apr 21, 2010, at 1:46 PM, Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote:
The Long Downturn | NewAmerica.net
finally paying attention...
Here's another version covering much the same ground, in the form of an interview. Brenner calls the crisis Marxian; don't know if that mean he is himself a Marxist, though the rest of the article would support that view. It would explain why most links on Google are of him being savaged by (other)? socialists....
http://brechtforum.org/robert-p-brenner-crisis
JEONG: Many assert that the current crisis is a typical 'Minsky crisis' not a Marxian one, arguing that that the financial speculation-bubble-bust has played the central role in this crisis. How would you respond?
BRENNER: I don’t think it's helpful to counter-pose in that way the real and financial aspects of the crisis. As I emphasized, it is a Marxian crisis, in that it finds its roots in a long term fall and failure to recover of the rate of profit, which is the fundamental source of the extended slowdown of capital accumulation right into the present.
He does at least offer one potential (admittedly dramatic) solution, though even he is ambivalent about it working:
To have a significant effect on the economy, the Obama administration will likely have to contemplate a huge wave of direct or indirect government investment, in effect a form of state capitalism. To actually accomplish this however would require overcoming enormous political and economic obstacles. The U.S. political culture is enormously hostile to state enterprise. At the same time, the level of expenditure and state indebtedness that would be required could threaten the dollar. Until now, East Asian governments have been happy to fund US external and government deficits, in order to sustain U.S. consumption and their own exports. But, with the crisis overtaking even China, these governments may lose the capacity to finance U.S. deficits, especially as they grow to unprecedented size. The truly terrifying prospect of a run on the dollar looms in the background.
Sobering stuff. I'd be tempted to admire him, but the only solution he seems to place faith in is Marxist revolution -- not a war of ideas, but of power:
Thus there is a big opening for left ideas. The problem is that there is very little organization of working people, let alone, any political _expression_. So one can say there is this very big opportunity created by the change in the political environment, or the ideological climate, but that by itself is not going to provide a progressive outcome. So, again, the top priority for progressives--for any left activists--where they should be active is in trying to revive the organizations of working people. Without the re-creation of working class power, little progressive will be possible, and the only way to recreate that power is by way of mobilization for direct action. Only through working people taking action, collectively and en masse, will they be able to create the organization and amass the power necessary to provide the social basis, so to speak, for a transformation of their own consciousness, for political radicalization.
Having better organized and radically conscious working people isn't going to magically make communism more efficient and less corrupt than it was in the Soviet Union. And maybe his Marxist bias is biasing his analysis and arguments. But darned if I know where...
-- Ernie P.
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