Can Capitalists Afford Recovery? Three Views on Economic Policy in Times of Crisis
Jonathan Nitzan and
Shimshon Bichler
Review of Capital as Power, 2014, vol. 1, issue 1, 110-155
Abstract:
Economic, financial and social commentators from all directions and of various persuasions are obsessed with the prospect of recovery. The world remains mired in a deep, prolonged crisis, and the key question seems to be how to get out of it. The purpose of our paper is to ask a very different question that few if any seem concerned with: can capitalists afford recovery in the first place? The article contextualizes and examines this question from the viewpoint of economic policy. The analysis is divided into three parts. The first part deals with the mainstream macroeconomic perspective. This approach claims to have already solved all the theoretical riddles, so the main emphasis here is on the practical question of how to engineer a recovery. The second part deals with the Marxist view. Marxists stress the inherent contradictions of accumulation, so the question for them is the very possibility of sustained growth. The third and final part takes the view of capital as power. Capitalized power hinges not on growth, but on strategic sabotage. So from this viewpoint, the key question is not how capitalists can achieve and sustain a recovery, but whether they can afford it to start with.
Keywords: crisis; DA; economic policy; economic theory; expectations; growth; income distribution; Keynesianism; Marxism; monetarism; neoclassical economics; profit; underconsumption (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/157913/1/b ... _recovery_recasp.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:caprev:157913
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in Review of Capital as Power from Capital As Power - Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().