Against claims of technofeudalism, Riley & Brenner insist Big Tech remains capitalist: rivalrous, investment-driven, disciplined by competition.
📌Yet across the economy, profit now depends on state-backed credit.
📌A debt-saturated order where liquidity replaces accumulation.

After responding to critics, Riley & Brenner redefine political capitalism: profits now arise less from production than from politically engineered rents. The circuit shifts from M–C–M′ to M–A–M′—money to asset to money plus surplus—value sustained by inflated assets.

In the new configuration, stagnation persists because no crisis has cleared out obsolete capital.
📌States sustain the slowdown through bailouts, tax cuts, and credit expansion
📌Bubbleonomics becomes the onlygame.
📌Growth falters, profits survive

(4/4) They also turn turn to @delong.social: the New Deal failed (or sceptical) to cure depression, and later, the Reagan boom masked stagnation. Deficits fed consumption, not production.

(3/4) For endogenous explanation, Riley & Brenner revisit R. Gordon’s thesis: even in the 1930s, technological dynamism survived. New industries emerged, yet profit revival required destruction and state-led renewal. WWII reignited accumulation and built the postwar boom.

(1/4)Some consequences (my interpretation):

📌To enter ownership, one must purchase cheaply — often on credit, indebted to the future.
📌To remain an owner, one must sell profitably in markets crowded with rivals.
📌Accumulation becomes a knife fight in a shrinking room.

Brenner and Riley,however, advance an endogenous account of secular stagnation, defining capitalism as a system of property relations. They trace issue to its core dynamic — the double constraint of market dependence that binds every owner of the means of production.

For Hansen growth depends not on consumption. Rather key driver is the expectation of future returns. However, that expectation is retrospective: capital projects the future through the memory of the past. When the past yields no confidence, investment freezes.

The genealogy begins with Alvin Hansen, who saw in the 1930s a capitalism unable to reproduce its own expansion. Against the Keynesian fixation on demand, Hansen located stagnation in the waning of new investment outlets.

First things first: Riley & Brenner reopen their long-running argument about capitalist stagnation. For fifty years, the long downturn has defined the landscape: weak growth, thin profits, exhausted dynamism. They revisit theories of secular stagnation🔽

Excited to see this! Another English one coming from me 😅Hopefully soon!

post a photo of you from a different era.

mid 2010s - in search of a post-Gezi political paradigm (failed experiment)

Very interesting research. From what I’ve seen in the literature, there are only brief interpretations on Feuerbach and Marx regarding alienation. Reading this thread reminded me of how G. Comninel discussed this in Alienation and Emancipation (2019).