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> 1. You didn't respond to my criticism of Brenner's explanation for the
recovery in the US mfg. profit rate.
No, I didn't I wasn't there defending Brenner, somethging I don't know enough to do, but just giving an exposition of the very basic structure of his argument, the nub of it, as it were. I will say that from my relatively ignorant perspective, Brenner's account makes more sense to me than others I have read, but I am not in a position to endorse it or really even to debate it with someone like you, who clearly knows a lot more about the area than I do.
> 2. You have Brenner wrong. He dismisses the idea of upward pressure on the
OCC as Malthusianism.
Brenner told me in a private e-mail that he thinks I have him pretty much right, but I won't post it without his permission, since he sent it to me privately. Brenner's theory is not cast in value theoretic terms and does not use notions like the organic compostion of capital.
> I think this is the basic idea of Brenner's, and it does not require a
repudiation of value theory to be made.
>>
It's not that Brenner's view requires a repudiation of value theory as much as it shows, by developing a coherent account of capitalism and crisis without using value theory, that Sraffa, or anyway Steedman or King & Howard were right in claiming that value theory is a fifth wheel.
--jks