Robert Brenner’s The Economics of Global Turbulence

Robert Brenner’s The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945-2005 (1998, rev. 2006) remains among the best accounts of the evolution of advanced capitalist economies since the Second World War. His analysis of the long downturn, although strongly criticized by certain Marxists, proved able to account not only for the great recession but also for the global economic stagnation ever since. Even bourgeois scholars of different persuasions – whether neoclassical, neo-Keynesian, post-Keynesian or Kaleckian – now acknowledge that the dynamism of the advanced capitalist economies has been slowing dynamism ever since the 1980s.

We are engaging in a close reading of the text with extensive discussion. We read 10 to 15 pages in each session and expect to finish the book in 6 months. We will follow up with a reading of Brenner’s The Boom and The Bubble and his article “What is Good for Goldman Sachs is Good for America,” in which he extends his analysis to account for the Great Recession.