I generally agree. Beyond the focus on secular stagnation, it seems that the conceptual framework of political capitalism is provoking more substantive debate, which this article handles more effectively (compard to Seven Theses) by keeping the discussion within clearer analytical boundaries.

I’ll cover the sections on class realignment in the next thread.

Until then, check out my comprehensive examination on the conceptual framework of political capitalism:
textumdergi.net/siyasi-kapit...

The Long Downturn and Its Political Results reads like an autopsy of capitalism.
Across every crisis the same recurs: profitability without production, power without growth.

The downturn is capitalism.

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.

(2/4)📌Competition, once capitalism’s animating force, turns corrosive.
📌Firms innovate to survive; innovation multiplies capacity and drives down prices.
📌Each cycle of recovery prepares the next contraction, everything turns circular, like an engine revving in neutral.

(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.

Larry Summers revived this idea in the 2010s and drained it of severity, reducing it to weak demand and cheap capital.

In both Hansen and Summers' accounts secular stagnation remained descriptive and related to exogenous factors.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvmh...

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🔽

When imperial land grants (gult) broke down during Oromo migrations, Ethiopia’s social order unraveled. Hatäta emerges here—as a philosophical response to lost sovereignty, religious conflict, and the need to ground ethics beyond feudal and clerical power.