Doug asks:
> So if this Marxian cycle
>theory doesn't apply to the most important capitalist country over the last
>50 years, where does it apply?
>From Mattick to Cogoy to Shaikh, there has been an attempt to examine how
crisis can be *deferred* through public and private credit. Of course
Mattick quite persuasively analyzed why there would be weakening effect
from the use of Keynesian instruments.
Moreover, Carchedi examines how falling profitability can be staved off by
advanced capitals through the mechanisms of unequal exchange. In recent
analysis he also also explored the hidden appropriation of value in the
seignorage priviliges from the dollar as the world reserve currency.
Relevant citations to all this work can be found in Guglielmo Carchedi's
Frontiers of Political Economy (London: Verso, 1991) and past issues of
*Capital and Class*.
If you are willing this time to offer more than the snide comment that
Carchedi's work reads like badly written reports from the Financial Times
with bad algebra, I would be more than happy to read it.
If there are questions about the relevance of Marxian value theory to East
Asia, perhaps we could read Makoto Itoh World Economic Crisis and Japanese
Capitalism (though of course I am not persuaded by his criticism of Cogoy,
Bullock, Yaffe, etc). I believe that Michael Perelman has reviewed this
book. It would of course be most interesting to compare Itoh's work to
another book easily accessible to the non-economist: Shigeto Tsuru, Japan's
Capitalism: Creative Defeat and Beyond (especially since Tsuru understands
the mixed economy as a stable evolutionary stage in the history of
capitalism, the basic idea that capitalism has indeed changed--that is, the
thesis that Mattick subjected to critique; of course we could look at
Tsuru's early critque of Grossmann, now included in his fabulous
Institutional Economics Revisted.).
Rakesh
