> A question: would overcapacity in the steel industry not have been absorbed
> by the commodities boom a while back? And could this in turn not be
> interpreted partly as a demand for materials for use in overproduction and
> partly as demand for material in order to expand into the erstwhile
> periphery (China etc.) which would in turn lead to more overcapacity due to
> competitive pressures?
Their argument is not related to an upturn in steel demand/production. It is rather, IIRC, that the cycle of plant scrapping and new investment is pretty routine and that technical and geographical revolutions in the steel industry happened without the problems Brenner makes a big deal about re: competition from old plant.
> I don't think he was reluctant to believe in the turning point in the
> mid-90s. He wrote an afterward for the 2006 copy of the book where he argued
> that although this did occur it was unsustainable. I'll quote here the last
> paragraph in full, but before I do so I have to say that not only does it
> prove prescient in light of the credit crunch, but it also helps explain why
> every day something highly pessimistic comes out in the news about some
> overproduction/underconsumption problem. The most striking was the fall off
> in demand for Chinese products which was huge, but even today the media are
> reporting an "unexpectedly severe" contraction in European demand (
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7985526.stm). Often I get the feeling
> that the writings on the wall here...
The question is not whether or not Brenner can talk about a bunch of issues that are relevant to the crisis, but whether they can be shoehorned into the mono-causal hypothesis of perpetual investment overhang in manufacturing. Capitalism is always full of contradictions, but they haven't stopped it from being generally dynamic and expansionary. You can always tell a story of problem cascading into problem at any period of capitalist history - even the postwar boom - but you're missing something if you see it as permanently embattled, staggering from one depression to the next.
The problem I have with the falling-rate-of-profit explanations of the current crisis - in general, not just Brenner's version - is not that I think the rate of profit is never an element of crisis. It's with this weird idea that a crisis hasn't been properly explained until it's been linked to the rate of profit, or at least something in the 'real economy', out of some misguided belief that finance is an epiphenomenon. I have some sympathy for overaccumulation theories of the crisis, but only if they can deal in an integrated way with the financial side of accumulation, and not see it as just froth. And a financial crisis is possible even without overaccumulation (overaccumulation defined, by the way, as a generalised accumulation of capital whose value is out of touch with future income flows to the owner of the assets, whether financial or physical).
Mike Beggs scandalum.wordpress.com