Andrew Kliman

A convincing refutation of conventional "left" wisdom about the economic crisis that focuses on it as a structural, capitalist phenomena. It rejects the notion that it was somehow uniquely "neoliberal" and that neoliberal politics have been responsible for all capitalist problems of the last 30 years, as well as rejecting the idea that simple redistribution or Keynesian policies are a good solution - with implicit rejection of all right wing ideas which refuse to tackle the plain facts of capitalist operation. It's an excellent and stats-heavy defence of Marxism without compromise.

Some of his main points (excuse me if I mess up a lot):
- Neoliberal policies didn't cause a return to increasing profitability, signs of an increasing "profit rate" were to a large extent fueled by huge increases in debt
- Recovery from the Great Depression was caused to a large extent by a "destruction of capital" where dramatic reduction in prices of property allowed take-overs of property to restore profitability (much lower capital cost but same value produced)
- No such destruction of capital happened in the 70s, preventing a return to high levels of profitability (related to the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall)
- The "profit rate" used by many economists to show recovery from neoliberal policies is a poor measure of actual profit that obscures the reality, making their analysis meaningless to reality
- Increases in inequality of wages are nowhere near as significant when total compensation (including Social Security, healthcare etc) is taken into account - total compensation for workers has not stagnated
- Bailouts were designed to save the *system* of capitalism rather than benefit individual capitalists, making talk about how they benefited the rich misleading because things like TARP often stuffed individual capitalists
- Saving capitalism by redistributing wealth downwards would actually reduce profitability further and induce further crises - the "underconsumption" theory by which the crisis is caused by workers not being able to spend as much mixes up cause and effect and is based on logical and statistical errors (most notably the idea that making goods for consumption is the ultimate goal of capital - it's quite possible for production of invested goods to increase near indefinitely and in fact the % of goods produced for further investment has increased at about 4x the rate of goods produced for consumption)
- Programs from the left focused on "saving capitalism" are therefore inherently wrong and ignore the problems experienced in the past with such policies as well as the real world situation now - they can only lead people away from meaningful revolutionary change

All is explained way way better in the book but yeah it's a great read… (mais)

Andrew Kliman's book seeks to reclaim Marx' "Capital" as a work of internal consistency and a valid, if not necessarily correct, exposition of the Marxist Law of Value. His main opponents in this, interestingly enough, are other Marxists, and the followers of Sraffa, both of which have done everything imaginable over the past century to propagate the myth that there is a "transformation problem" between prices and values in Marxist economic theory, and that Marx needs to be 'corrected' to fix this glaring oversight.

Kliman demonstrates irrefutably that these claims are false. He shows that, for each and every 'exposé' and each and every subsequent 'solution' proposed, the same errors are at the basis of the reasoning. All of the arguments about the transformation problem rest on either dualism between price and value, which Marx nowhere supports, or physicalism (which means that profit exists as physical surplus), which is false, or simultaneism (which means that input prices and output prices have to be equal during the same production period), which is also false, or usually a combination of these things. Even well-respected Marxist economists, such as Laibman and Moseley, have fallen into this trap, and this goes for non-Marxists who have written about Marxist economics equally (Robinson and Samuelson for example).

By destroying the basis of the physicalist, dualist, simultaneist critique of Marx, and substituting for it the temporal single system interpretation (TSSI) of Marx, which allows everything Marx says in "Capital" to make sense and to be internally valid and consistent, Kliman demonstrates that the "transformation problem" has been a problem on the part of some readers, not Marx, all along, and that the reports of the death of the Marxist theory of value have been greatly exaggerated.

All of this is done wonderfully and with iron logic. The one downside of this book, as with every book by Kliman and/or Freeman, is the pointless invective aimed at their opponents and the almost paranoid tone in which the lack of positive reception on the part of Kliman et al. is discussed. Even respected Marxist colleagues, who probably agree politically and scientifically with Kliman on 99.9% of all issues, are constantly portrayed as ignorant at best and malevolent and intellectually dishonest at worst, without any proof for this at all. Kliman and the other TSSI people would probably do better to be more respectful in their refutations of their opponents, because in that way they make it a lot easier for these opponents to change their stance without feeling humiliated about it. This would be beneficial for Marxism and all of economics as a whole, since the TSSI interpretation is most certainly correct.… (mais)