>
> Sorry for length, but I have to get this off my chest. To me, Fitch's
> piece, along with the Robert Brenner interview that Patrick Bond pointed to
> a couple weeks ago (below), demonstrate the deep weaknesses of what we might
> call the emerging Marxist analysis of the crisis. I like Fitch and Brenner -
> when I see their bylines I always read the article. But their analyses of
> the crisis just don't make sense.
>
> Both of them start with the same obligatory premise: Those bourgeois myopes
> who think the crisis somehow originated in finance have once again failed to
> see the Deeper Mechanisms at work. Really, it's all about the rate of
> profit. It must be.
Great post! I completely agree. It has to be said though that not _all_ the emerging Marxist analysis of the crisis takes this form.
I was at the Historical Materialism conference in London back in November, and this point was heavily debated. It came to a climax at the plenary session on the crisis, with Brenner, Gerard Dumenil, David McNally and Costas Lapvitsas (who was meant to be discussant but pretty much ended up giving a complete paper of his own). At an earlier session Dumenil had been mocking the idea that 'the profit rate had to be behind the crisis'. He pointed out that some people seemed to argue that profits were too high relative to profitable outlets for investing surplus (hence financial bubbles) while other people seemed to argue that profits were too low, hence not enough real investment was taking place. Himself, he thought the crisis was of financial origin and that the profit rate had been relatively steady and had little to do with it. Coming from Dumenil (co-author of 'Economics of the profit rate') this meant quite a lot.
At the plenary session Brenner gave his usual argument and Dumenil ripped into his stats. Unfortunately there was no overhead display and Dumenil couldn't present his own (Brenner's were distributed to the audience beforehand as print-outs). Brenner defended himself and it went back and forth a bit, and they concluded that it would be great to have a debate with all the stats on the table, but Brenner had to leave the session early to catch a flight and that was it.
Lapavitsas was pretty good, also dismissive of the profit-rate line, and he elaborated at another session, alongside Paolo Dos Santos. They focused entirely on finance and banking and their analysis was basically institutional, in fact quite close to post-Keynesian accounts. Apparently these are going to become papers in the forthcoming HM issue, alongside Dumenil and Brenner. You can find versions already floating around the web.
Anyway I'll engage with the substance of what you wrote in another email.
Cheers, Mike Beggs