Jurriaan Bendien wrote: > What I am trying to say here is that people have this theory, but they don’t > really know anymore what the question is that the theory is supposed to > answer, it is more or less a theory in search of a question to which it is > an answer. It is sort of like, if Marxism is the answer, what is the > question? I’ve read a lot of literature on crisis theory, but most of the > time it is not really clear what the point of it is.
Maybe there are people like that, though you haven't named anyone. But please do not name anyone. My point is instead that not everyone associated with Marxian macroeconomics (crisis theory) is like that. Blanket generalizations don't help, especially when they are about people's opinions. If you want to criticize someone's theory, it's best to specific and employ logic, empirical data, methodology, and stuff like that. In any event, if there's no point to it all, that makes the unnamed Marxists you're talking about exactly like the vast majority of academics. "What's the point? it's a job! I have to pay the bills. It was something I was interested in during graduate school...." > It is certainly true that capitalism develops through booms and slumps, but > it is difficult to prove this is a cyclical process, since within ten years > or 25 years a lot of qualitative changes occur. It is also difficult to > prove that the causes of the ups and downs must always be the same, or more > or less the same. Does anyone believe that business "cycles" either long or short are truly cyclical, i.e., regular in length? I doubt it. The word people use is "fluctuations" and sometimes "oscillations." There is no assumption of regular cycles. As for different causes of different crises, see empirical work in the broadly-defined Marxian school by David Kotz (associated with the SSA school) and Howard Sherman (who actually tends to think in terms of cycles). Both found that the behavior of US business fluctuations changed between the 1960s/1970s and the neoliberal era. This fits with my 1994 article that I cited in my previous message in this thread: in my theory, the dynamics and the "crises" (or business downturns) in a labor-scarce economy such as that of the US during the 1960s and 1970s differ from those in a labor-abundant economy (such as in the US during the 1920s or the period after 1979 or so. In the former, we see "over-investment relative to supply constraints" while in the latter we see "over-investment relative to consumption." Of course, as some old guy once said, the actual experience is "overdetermined" since there are other dimensions that this formula ignores. -- Jim Devine / "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." -- Philip K. Dick _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
