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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. 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 about surveillance
capitalism as if she coined the phrase. Really disgusting but par for the
course. Zuboff's work is natural
ly 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.
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