[WS:] Look, I do not buy this marxist-hegelian trope that the world will come to a screeching halt because of some logical contradiction. Nor do I buy the marxist-functionalist trope that people do what the system "requires" them to. I just tried to summarize Brenner's argument and point out that there is more into it than some people on this list imply.
Having said that, I have to say that I read _The Economics of Global Turbulence_ with a bit of s surprise. I know Brenner as an economic historian who argued for a institutionalist origins of capitalism in Europe against functionalist marxist interpretations of pre-capitalist system "exhausting" its productive potential. In essence, Brenner argued that it was the political-organizational power of English lords to directly extract surplus from peasants that led to marketization of the agricultural production. He advances his arguments by finding counterfactuals through a comparative analysis of other European countries.
_The Economics of Global Turbulence_ seemingly departs from that line of thought toward economic functionalism against which he used argue. Trying to prove his point that capitalism has a systemic flaw, Brenner dismisses the claim that decline in profit rates resulted from the power of labor to demand higher wages. While this claim is not particularly difficult to dismiss (everyone knows that power of unions and wages have been going south in the second half of the 20th century) - it also stipulates that the power balance between capitalists and labor is inconsequential - which is a very different argument than the one he proposed re. the origins of European capitalism (where power and institutional arrangements were the key explanatory factor.)
I can also see why Brad interprets Brenner in economic functionalist terms (i.e. logical properties of the system leading to its real world demise) - albeit one can also argue that there is enough institutional stuff (cf. the developmental states) in Brenner argument to deflect the charge of simple functionalism. The international competition with developmental states - which Brenner identifies as a key institutional mechanism responsible for falling profit rates - does not have to lead to the eventual demise of the system - it can merely increase its transaction (i.e. "maintenance") costs. Arguably this is not a fatal flow - it can continue to exist until a way of reducing these transaction costs is found. What is more, this transaction cost reduction does not need to abolish capitalism, it can strengthen it just as the Keynesian innovation did.
So for these reasons I am not quite convinced by Brad's claim that Brenner falls into the pit of marxist functionalism predicting demise resulting from logical contradictions. However, he seem to venture dangerously close to this territory.
Wojtek