>What are the policy implications of the Bhandari analysis, anyway?
None really.
And you and a lot of other people know what I am going to say, so skip the rest if you wish.
The orthodox Marxist theory of general world market crises, being also a theory of prolonged stagnation and violent--if less frequent--cycles, implies that are no policies by the implementation of which can capitalism be regulated towards the elimination of crises, growing absolute misery, and ominous intl stability (all concessions at both the union and political level that workers gain are thus likely to be reversed, making past victories and current reforms important mostly for the organisation, initiative and unity the working class learned to achieve in pursuit of its interests--this is how I read the end of *Value, Price and Profit*). Just as Grossmann critiqued Hilferding for the idea that a peaceful socialisation of the banks by the state made the regulation of capital possible without revolutionary class struggle at the point of production, Mattick critiqued the Keynesians for the belief that technocrats could be successful in stabilising the boom-bust cycle and ensuring rising levels of welfare via interest rate manipulations and debt financed govt expenditures Like his mentor Grossmann, Mattick also argued that workers would have to themselves find new ways of organizing production outside the dominance of capital and the state. Do note that Sweezy reached the same conclusion on the basis of the power of oligopolies to wreck or hijack Keynesian programs, thereby also arguing that there are no policies that would be successful without a direct and revolutionary challenge on private economic power. There is also a new kind of criticism of Keynesian policy options from the point of the autonomist Marxists and Open Marxists--Antonio Negri, Massimo DeAngelis, Werner Bonefeld and John Holloway.
So I read Marxism as a critique of policy solutions.
yours, rakesh