t r u t h o u t | On Your Marx: Neoliberalism on the Rocks

truthout op-ed:

"Of course there are reasons for being suspicious of Marxism. During the Third International and in the scattered sectarian life it has led outside the universities since the Second World War, Marxism has shown a susceptibility to dogma hardly equaled outside of American economics departments. But the ideological rout that Marxism began to suffer in the ’70s did what periods in the wilderness are supposed to do: it discouraged bandwagon-jumpers and enforced a new seriousness on those who stuck around. The truth is that since the neoliberal era began thirty years ago, Marxism has yielded some of its most formidable monuments of economic thought. Two in particular are David Harvey’s abstract and categorical Limits to Capital (1982), which as the restatement and completion of a great thinker’s project easily outclasses Minsky’s John Maynard Keynes (1975), and Robert Brenner’s narrative and empirical Economics of Global Turbulence (2006), which barely mentions Marx while vindicating, through an analysis of the postwar American, German, and Japanese economies, the idea Marx took from David Ricardo and made his own: the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in a situation of free competition.

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In economics, the analogous route is Marxism, which like psychoanalysis has a dubious reputation—and an explanatory power and long-term perspective that its rivals can’t touch. With luck, the next intellectual consequence of the crisis will be to pry the lid off Marx’s tomb, since it is only from a Marxian standpoint that the recent credit bubble can be understood in terms of the structural problems it affected to solve as well as those it has created."

http://www.truth-out.org/on-your-marx-neoliberalism-rocks60654