Renegades: Cockburn, Mandel, etc

Rakesh Bhandari bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU
Thu Sep 17 10:15:04 PDT 1998


Mr LoCasio's criticism is a brilliant one, only marred by his neglect of Cockburn's greatest outrage--his dimwitted psychobabble critique of the Unabomber, the authentic voice of the revolutionary proletariat.

As for Mandel, I am still trying to figure out whether Mandel actually did lay out the limits of interest rate reductions or whether he did confuse govt production or state led redistribution of surplus value with the actual production of additional surplus value on which, along with a reorganization of the capital structure, the resumption of the accumulation of capital ultimately depends. I am going to look through Louis' otherwise interesting post for clues of where to look for the answer of these two questions

Louis insists that Mandel had grasped the limits and contradictions of the Keynesian pseudo-solution; however, if he has handy Mandel's 1964 "Economics of Neo-Capitalism" from International Socialism I think he will find the most startling concessions to Keynesian economics.

But I will not be able to work through Mandel or the critiques by Tom Kemp (in Marx's Capital Today. new Park Publishers) or Paul mattick (in Economic Crisis and Crisis Theory). I have a long upswing of work in front of me and I wouldn't want to suffer from any undertones of stagnation.

best, rakesh



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