The Myth of Secular Stagnation, Part One
What is behind the concern over secular stagnation? Is it possible to understand this concern within the context of the labor theory of value? I ask that because almost all discussion of secular stagnation takes place in the context of neoclassical/Keynesian theory. To answer the question, I will look at several papers and article on the subject written from within neoclassical/Keynesian theory that attempt to make sense of the problem.
My perspective, however, will be unique in relation to the writers, because I will argue that stagnation is not a symptom of capitalist crisis per se, but a symptom of increasingly ineffective fascist state management of national capitals. In my perspective, capital has already suffered the breakdown of production on the basis of exchange value. This occurred in the Great Depression and was irreversible. However, after that breakdown, the fascist state stepped in and assumed management of the production of surplus value. The subject of the discussion of secular stagnation is the increasingly ineffective system of state management of capitalist production, not the operation of national capitals, per se.
June 1, 2015
A reply to Reidkane on the class character of proletarians
In 1846, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels met together with a few other communists to lay out their common approach to the social revolution then developing in Europe. The results of their work, as we all know, was an unpublished manuscript now known as the German Ideology. In it Marx and Engels elaborate on a method of social analysis we now refer to as historical materialism.
That document makes a number of claims about the proletarians which we today might consider heresies. Three in particular are the subject of the commenter, Reidkane:
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