[lbo-talk] Is Paul Krugman cribbing from Monthly Review?

Julio Huato juliohuato at gmail.com
Mon Nov 18 14:15:15 PST 2013


In the U.S. political context, the adoption of this Larry-Summersian "secular stagnation" story is a retreat by Krugman, Jared Bernstein, and perhaps others in that crowd. I'm not sure how aware Krugman is of it, since he has other blog posts that contradict this story. The real issue is *not* the built-in tendencies of some abstract capitalist society, or even a capitalist society with some historically-specific institutional characteristics (usually under the assumption that workers are chopped liver).

No, no. It is, instead, about rationalizing, supplying excuses to leave this political establishment here and now off the hook. It is about naturalizing (turning into a natural juggernaut) a *social*, human-made and humanly-resolvable crisis, a crisis in the social relations of production --- because this is how actual people on the street are increasingly perceiving it. Ask around and see if people believe that the political establishment is working for them.

"You see? Even the powerful U.S. government, the Fed, etc. are unwitting victims of the inherent trends of global capitalism." What an elegant cop out. It seems to me like a replay of the "structural unemployment" story: "There's nothing the establishment can do in response to 7%+ secular official unemployment and concomitant, widespread social need; the U.S. labor force is structurally unfit to take the jobs of the 21st century, blah blah. People should just accept that, live with it." No and no. It is the existing political system that is proving to be structurally unfit to lead this nation.

Young people, who are being hit hard by the existing conditions in the labor market, are arriving at this conclusion rather quickly. Not all of them are immediately drawing the political conclusions we in the left would want them to draw, but a significant portion of them are. How do I know? I've been teaching U.S. college kids, from working and "middle-class" backgrounds for almost two decades, and I've seen the shift speed up.



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