> I think that you may be painting an over-simplistic view of the
> structure of Brenner's argument.
We're talking about two different things here. You're talking about Brenner's basic argument, first laid out in Economics of Global Turbulence, where he said we were in the midst of a Long Downturn whose roots lay in chronic overcapacity and a resulting profitability crisis, and whose symptoms were various.
I'm talking about Brenner's recent effort (in the interview I cited) to depict the aforementioned profitability plight as the *cause* of the *current* financial/economic crisis. (Actually, the effort is not so new, since he also said the same thing about the 1998 financial crisis, which was happening around the time he published EoGT.)
In order to get from (a) long-term crisis-of-profitability to (b) today's insolvent-banks-and-consumers, Brenner had to put together some chain of causation, and he did. He constructed the four-step chain I summarized:
> (1) There was a crisis of profitability due to overcapacity
> (2) The profitability crisis forced capitalists to cut wages and social
> spending
> (3) The wage cuts led to insufficient aggregate demand
> (4) To address the demand problem, the authorities engineered or permitted
> a series of bubbles which allowed the growth of household credit to
> compensate for workers' declining wages
Now, I happen to find the general idea of lower-80% workers borrowing (against the backdrop of asset bubbles) to make up for declining wages, thus setting up a debt bomb, to be perfectly plausible. But if their declining wages were not caused by capitalists cutting their wages to boost profits that were under pressure from overcapacity - then in what way is the current crisis connected with the alleged overcapacity problem? It isn't.
SA