[lbo-talk] Larry Summers channeling Sweezy?

[Michael Yates]

 Jim Farmelant wonders if Summers is aware of the Monthly Review school of thought on secular stagnation. I think he is. He is from a family of economists, and is nephew to Paul Samuelson and Kenneth Arrow. Samuelson devoted much effort to a refutation of Marx, and surely Summers is aware of this work and much more. Economists actually did study the history of economic thought in times gone by. I did. Sweezy was, according to Georgescu-Roegen, the best of the young Harvard economists in the 1930s. So it is unimaginable that Summers doesn't know about MR's economics. That he wouldn't cite them is not surprising. The MR school has radical implications, which Summers, Krugman, et. al. don't want to dwell on. Similarly, MR's summer 2014 issue was titled "Surveillance Capitalism," and contains many interesting articles on the surveillance society in which we find ourselves today. Now Shoshana Zuboff, emeritus professor at Harvard, has taken to writing (in the Harvard Business Review, for example) about surveillance capitalism as if she coined the phrase. Really disgusting but par for the course. Zuboff's work is naturally also devoid of radical conclusions. What is most disturbing, however, is when radicals think that because mainstream thinkers begin to dabble in radical theory that this means anything good. It does not. See my essay, "Occupy Wall Street and the Celebrity Economists." Harry Magdoff called Paul Krugman a "prizefighter for capitalism." So is Summers, and so is Zuboff. As the old labor song says, Which Side Are You On? These people know what side they are on, and it isn't ours. 

Kevin Lindeman on marxmail reminded me that MR's editors said this:

"Notes from the Editors," Monthly Review, October 2014:
"Especially noteworthy in this respect was Sweezy’s path-breaking lecture “Why Stagnation?” delivered to the Harvard Economics Club in March 1982 (appearing in MR in June 1982). This raises the intriguing question: Was Summers present at Sweezy’s “Why Stagnation?” talk? We contacted Summers’s office on August 24, and were told that he said he didn’t recall, “but could be!”; his office then contacted us later the same day and said that he had reconsidered this and while he still did not remember, he thought it “unlikely.” Whether or not Summers was actually present on this occasion—and he believes it likely he was not—the question remains as to whether he was aware at the time of Sweezy’s talk, and of his general argument on stagnation. It is hard to imagine how all of this could have passed Summers by completely.
Isn’t it about time, then, that orthodox economists, Summers included, began to acknowledge the enormous work done on this topic on the left over decades, and indeed the greater complexity and historicity of the analysis to be found there—not only in MR but within heterodox economics more generally? Such an admission might even do orthodox economists some good."

What is most disturbing, however, is when radicals think that because mainstream thinkers begin to dabble in radical theory that this means anything good. It does not. See my essay, "Occupy Wall Street and the Celebrity Economists." Harry Magdoff called Paul Krugman a "prizefighter for capitalism." So is Summers, and so is Zuboff. As the old labor song says, Which Side Are You On? These people know what side they are on, and it isn't ours.