The politics of capitalism

Monthly Review

Volumn 51, Issue 4, 1999, Pages 12-26

  Wood, Ellen Meiksins ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0347647991     PISSN: 00270520     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.14452/mr-051-04-1999-08_2     Document Type: Review

References (9)

1. Originally in "From Opportunity to Imperative: The History of the Market," Monthly Review, July-August 1994, pp. 14-40, and most recently in The Origin of Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999).
2. Originally in "From Opportunity to Imperative: The History of the Market," Monthly Review, July-August 1994, pp. 14-40, and most recently in The Origin of Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999).
3. Such arguments, including Marxist versions, are discussed in The Origin of Capitalism.
4. Brenner, "The Economics of Global Turbulence," New Left Review 229 (May-June 1998), p. 10.
5. An account of this basic mechanism similar to Brenner's can be found in "How the mighty are falling," Financial Times, November 30, 1998. But this is just the kernel of Brenner's analysis, which attempts to explain not only the basic mechanism of overproduction/overcapacity and the consequent fall in profitability but also why these continued to be reproduced in the long downturn, keeping profitability from recovering for such a long time. David McNally, in the June issue of MR, briefly summarizes the argument and elaborates on some of the ways in which the tendency to overcapacity analyzed by Brenner is related to wider trends in the global economy.
6. Some of the criticisms of Brenner on this score may have more to do with the anonymous editorial introduction to his analysis, and its somewhat misleading account of his argument (not to mention its provocatively fulsome praise of Brenner), than with the analysis itself.
7. Calling neoliberalism a failure will no doubt seem odd to those who regard the U.S. economy as a brilliant success. For a corrective to that triumphalism, see Doug Henwood's piece in this year's summer issue of MR.
8. I owe this point to Gerard Greenfield, who sent me, by e-mail, an extremely interesting and fruitful argument elaborating in a new way my distinction between the market as opportunity and as imperative, which I hope he will develop and publish.
9. Eds. T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin, The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge, 1985).