Maybe that's why they published Desai's book--which puts both of these theories (or their synthesis) as primary evidence (with supporting materials) as proof that Marx is/was right. The rest of it is provocative but ain't gonna start any movement since it's basic approach is one similar to (as closely as I can tell--sorry if I'm wrong) that of James in the debate on the dam, but with Marx as the prophet of progress: his basic stance is that Marx would have been in favor of all the rapacious destruction wrought by market fundamentalism because it would eventually bring about the progress towards a new world order. I know Marx was a cranky fucker sometimes and the arguments with List on the subject of trade seem pointed in this regard, but Desai's version seems to have an internal logic to it that makes Marx sound like he believed that, yes, wherever, capitalism squats it makes shit: but wait a few years and you'll have a diamond. In short, without the defense of the LTV and falling rate of profit, the book is basically just a contrarian version of Marx which would always put him on the side of the Indian government, sneering at the activists across the way. Maybe Perry knows he did bad and wanted to try to make it up to you (and all subsequent Marxist thought).
> NLR's crisis theory as expressed by Brenner does not depend on
> Marx or the labor theory of value or the falling rate of profit, and can
> be shown to imply the same
> possibility of stabilization of capitalism as Sweezy is said to have,
> though for Brenner the instrument would not be Keynesian planning but the
> regulation of trade and international competition--the putative causes of
> the great downturn. I made this argument upon immediate publication of
> Brenner's NLR issue on this list.
I'll look for it. My sense was that the point of most of this school is that capitalism is an economic system that has political roots--and coercive force--that is obscured by its seemingly voluntaristic surface. But I don't know which specific Brenner article you're talking about. It seems odd, in any case, that he would attribute anything to trade or competition since this is precisely the thing he challenged in Wallerstein and (I think) this Sweezy book. I'll admit, however, that the closer I try to read Brenner's analysis of the origins of capitalism, the more my eyes glaze over--not his fault but mine: my cognitive map of class and sub class positions of the pre-modern social formation--much less the dominant understanding of the (Marxist) historians of them--and the like is too insufficient for me to understand when he's making a really big point.
The more I read that debate and feel like there are a bunch of grown-ups talking in the room and I'd be better off going out to play.
I feel relatively the same way when I tried to read Bensaid's book /Marx for our times/ last year, which also takes on a different group in the tradition of Political Marxists (who then got rebranded as Rat Choice). There are moments where I really think I understand the distinctions he's making, but then they quickly fade.
> While every word of Gramsci and Lukacs have been studied, not enough
> attention has been paid to the actual writings of Austro Marxism. Too
> scientific for the cultural and philosophical Marxists and too bourgeois
> for Trotskyists. So their work has not received the critical attention
> which it deserves, including the splits within it.
Any suggestion on a good primer or a place to start? The pool of readings that are too scientific for CS and too bourgeois for the Trots is probably way too deep to wade through without a roadmap. It also might be good to have a more general sense of what the Austro-Marxist tradition was. I have an idea but I imagine it goes way beyond someone like Schumpeter (who seems more Austrian than Marxist, but seems to have basically given up the game in the end in just about the same way as Sweezy--though it seems there are several versions of his own position in this thread.)
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