>My feeling is that Marxism confronts a formidable intellectual challenge
>in neo Ricardian theory as developed by Pasinetti (more important than
>Sraffa, it seems) and in the post Keynesian reformist agenda which
>follows from it in the writings of the brilliant duo of James Galbraith
>and William Darity, Jr or Thomas Palley (these left-liberal thinkers give
>substance to what nine out of ten *Nation* readers think needs to be
>done).
>
>Our Doug is a very complex thinker, one foot in and one foot out of
>this tradition. To his great credit, he seems to be despised by some
>of the more respectable post keynesians for harping on class struggle and
>all that shit.
One foot in only because I think the working class is stronger than it otherwise would be if unemployment is low, welfare checks are generous, unions are strong, minimum wages are high, etc. That's no resting place though - quite the opposite, since the capitalists will fight even this agenda, if not to the death, pretty close. Of course they may name the enemy inflation or some other euphemism for what is fundamentally class struggle.
By the way, Merrill Lynch's chief economist Bruce Steinberg used to be on the edit board of the Review of Radical Political Economics. He credits his undergraduate experience of Marxism at SUNY-Stony Brook with helping his Wall Street career.
Doug