On 2010-09-25 12:26, Jurriaan Bendien wrote:
> The Marxist theoretical myopia reaches its culmination in the Brenner
> thesis. As Anwar Shaikh puts it: "Central to Brenner's thesis is the claim
> that the fortunes of US manufacturing in the period from 1965-73 determined
> the subsequent economic health of the whole advanced world. But, in those
> times, US manufacturing accounted for about 25 percent of US Gross Domestic
> Product (GDP), and a mere 12 percent of the advanced world's GDP. Yet,
> according to Brenner, this one sector was the lever which moved the world.
> The central theoretical question, of course, is how this could possibly be
> so?"
> http://homepage.newschool.edu/~AShaikh/Explaining%20the%20Global%20Economic%20Crisis.pdf
Although I think this point about the manufacturing sector is correct,
the GDP share of a sector is an insufficient variable to assess its
impact. One would need to look at the input-output tables to see its
interconnection to the entire economy.
For instance, if the finance sector were ten times larger than the
nonfinancial corporations, the profitability of the latter would still
be significant if not crucial to the development of the capitalist
economy, since the surplus product is produced within them.
//Dave Z
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Received on Sat Sep 25 10:28:52 2010
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