Discussion
This is really just scraping the surface. I think it's well worth £4 to read the source document. I look forward to the further development of this theory, to its being streamlined. It's got a lot of important things to say, even if it is a little hard to metabolize at present.
37/
@pluralistic Excellent as usual! It’s great to have at least somebody who understands the basic principle of money = power in the public intellectual sphere. For the most we only have hectobillionaires pretending to be victims and their schills. 🙂
"in a persistently low- or no-growth environment…parties can no longer operate on the basis of programmes for growth."
Meanwhile, all parties do blather on endlessly about finding ways to 'grow the economy.' We need to ask them what their plans are if there is no 'growth.'
I really like the application of the concept of "metabolizing" in this context.
But as you develop the theory, it gets progressively more streamlined as you realize which parts can be safely omitted or combined without sacrificing granularity or clarity. This simplification requires a lot of iteration and reiteration, over a lot of time, for a lot of different audiences and critics. As Thoreau wrote (paraphrasing Pascal), "Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short."
2/
This week, I encountered a big, exciting theory that is still in the "long and complicated" phase, with so many moving parts that I'm having trouble keeping them straight in my head. But the idea itself is fascinating and has so much explanatory power, and I've been thinking about it nonstop, so I'm going to try to metabolize a part of it here today, both to bring it to your attention, and to try and find some clarity for myself.
3/
At issue is Dylan Riley and Robert Brenner's theory of "political capitalism," which I encountered through John Ganz's writeup of a panel to discuss Riley and Brenner's work:
https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/politics-and-capitalist-stagnation
Riley and Brenner developed this theory through a pair of *very* long (and paywalled) articles in the *New Left Review*. First is 2022's "Seven Theses on American Politics" (£3), which followed the Democrats' surprisingly good showing in the 2022 midterms:
https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii138/articles/4813
4/
The second article, "The Long Downturn and Its Political Results" (£4), is even longer, and it both restates the theory of "Seven Theses" and addresses several prominent critics of their work:
(If you're thinking about reading the source materials - and I urge you to do so - I think you can safely just read the second article, as it really does recap and streamline the original.)
5/
The second article, "The Long Downturn and Its Political Results" (£4), is even longer, and it both restates the theory of "Seven Theses" and addresses several prominent critics of their work:
(If you're thinking about reading the source materials - and I urge you to do so - I think you can safely just read the second article, as it really does recap and streamline the original.)
5/
So what *is* this theory? Ganz does a good job of breaking it down (better than Riley and Brenner, who, I think, still have a lot of darlings they can't bring themselves to murder). Here's my recap of Ganz's, then, with a few notes from the source texts thrown in.
Riley and Brenner are advancing both an economic and a political theory, with the latter growing out of the former.
6/
The economic theory seeks to explain two phenomena, the "Long Boom" (post-WWII to the 1960s or so), and the "Long Downturn" (ever since).
During the Long Boom, the US economy (and some other economies) experienced a period of sustained growth, without the crashes that had been the seemingly inevitable end-point of previous growth periods.
7/
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