Brenner on competition

Louis Proyect lnp3 at panix.com
Wed Sep 16 09:25:38 PDT 1998


Jim Farmelant:
>Furthermore, Paul Sweezy was in 1938 one of the authors
>and signatories of the influential Keynesian tract, *An Economic
>Program for American Democracy.* Besides Sweezy, the
>signatories such noted Keynesians as Paul Samuelson and
>J.K. Galbraith. Also, Sweezy besides teaching at Harvard
>also did work for a number of New Deal agencies.
>

Yes, and Harry Magdoff held a top post in a New Deal agency. This fondness for New Dealism is actually a soft-spot in MR. I am much more tuned in to Ernest Mandel's Marxist economics, which makes no concessions to Keynsianism.

The period we are entering will require us to have an unflinching attitude toward the capitalist class. We will have to burn bridges ideologically with a lot of institutions that don't want to go all the way, such as the increasingly useless Nation Magazine. It will become more important to oppose all liberal Democratic Party politicians, since their main goal is to preserve illusions that our problems can be solved through reform.

When I left the Trotskyist movement in 1978, it was because I was sick and tired of their eleventh hour apocalyptic bullshit. I have a copy of "New International", their theoretical rag, on my shelf at work that I keep around for laughs. There is a 1988 article in it titled "Imperialism's march toward fascism and war," written by cult-leader Jack Barnes. A decade had passed and the clock was still stuck at 11pm.

Okay, now it is 20 years later and we are finally in a different situation. Interestingly enough, I checked their gopher site (after they threw out all the computer programmers like me, there have been no cult members with the competence to do web design for them) this morning and there are no Militant articles dealing with the economic crisis. I guess now that it finally is 11pm, they don't have the guts to deal with the situation.

Louis Proyect

(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)



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