>Rakesh:
>
>>Mattick did predict the limits of the mixed economy in the 60s!
>
>So did a lot of right-wing economists.
Cmon Doug,
1. the theoretical basis of Mattick's analysis, based on the concepts of value and capital, was quite different. For example, even Sweezy thought that the major problem with Keynesianism was that it could organize non competitive production only as armaments. On the basis of value theory, Mattick shows the limits of the mixed economy even if all govt ordered production were non competitive, non militaristic. That is, his critique cuts deeper. For just an idea of how he proceeded, see my posts on the state.
2. Mattick did not believe that prosperity could be had by a return to Gladstonian liberalism (perhaps with denationalised money), which gives the Hayekian project a profoundly reactionary character as Stolper notes in his great Schumpeter bio
3. Mattick's argument clarified the proletarian struggle to abolish wage labor, capital and the state. No such clarification follows from right wing or left wing economics. It's the unique result of Marxism, properly understood.
4. I actually think the ties between von Mises and Hayek to fascism are no greater than Keynes' (for example, von Mises Planned Chaos is more politically astute than Keynes' German intro to the GT!) So who is right wing or what right wing means is quite unclear to me. Nor do I find less stimulating and erudite than Keynes von Mises' Theory of Money and Credit (excellent in many places in the critique of money fetishism as I have been finding out) or Hayek's exploration of the relation between time and capital (as summarized by Shackle).
Now as for the rest, I do not deny that the US capital has enjoyed greater profitability (though the prosperity remains unbelievably debt powered) but is this upward spike largely due to capital inflows and distress exports that can only be explained by a crisis mechanism at work for the total capital of which American capital is only a part?
Has the inflation that derives from taking advantage of seignoirage been exported so that cheap exports which relieve supply side difficulties on profitability have been a free gift? Will profitability be maintained in the near future through further centralisation of capital?
>Quick? The current merger wave is almost 20 years old. That may be
>quick in a cosmic timescale, but it's not an eyeblink on a more human
>level.
Uchitelle notes the acceleration in the 90s of centralisation which the acceleration must thus be explained.
>
>>Here then profitability is maintained for some time but at the expense of
>>staganation, unemployment, low rates of productivity, output and wage
>>growth.
This was true of America (still enjoying a remarkably weak boom despite so much outside help) until a couple of years ago, and remains true of Japan and Europe.I surely don't think close to thirty years of history is negated by a couple of boom years.
>Capitalism has always been about fratricidal competition and
>increasing scale. So? If FROP theory isn't - consciously or
>unconsciously - a theory of terminal crisis, what is it then?
Yes but qualitative leaps happen. Wars become means by which competition is fought out; there are leaps in the levels of centralisation; the state's latent power to crush strikes is revealed; eugenics/sterilisation/concentration camps replace the poorhouse, etc. At one level, FROP is a theory of qualitative leaps forward in the intensity of the class struggle.
yrs, rakesh