[Pen-l] SSAs [was: Taft-Hartley and the crisis

["Jim Devine" <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx>]

Terry  McDonough wrote:
> I'd like to endorse Jim's dating below.  The postwar capitalist expansion cannot be regarded as simply an interruption in the working out of basic capitalist contradictions.  In passing I'd like to invite Jim to come out as an SSA theorist.<

Like any school of thought, there's a tremendous amount of variety in
the SSA school. There's also a lot of overlap with other schools,
e.g., the emphasis on "medium level" institutions and empirical stuff
as determining the actual dynamics of capitalism, which is shared with
a lot of other institutionalists. (The medium level is between
abstract capitalism and specific detailed descriptions.) The SSA
school might be seen as being centered on a small number of people
(Michael Reich, the late David Gordon, Terry McDoough, etc.) or as an
amorphous school that includes all Marxian political economists who
refuse to stick with abstract crisis theory (such as the presumption
that the rate or profit is always falling, all else equal, or the
presumption that capitalism is always falling into stagnation, all
else equal). Of course, under the latter definition, Baran and Sweezy
were SSA theorists, since they provided a lot of concrete detail.

Because of the variety, it's hard to criticize or even to join the
school. Even though I might use a concept that's a bit like an "SSA"
(and I try to bring in a lot of empirical detail), I don't think of
myself as in the SSA school. My impression is that the school tends to
be empiricist because they don't worry enough about what capitalist
accumulation would be like without an SSA; crises seem to arise from
the SSA more than from capitalism.

More importantly, the "stages" or "eras" I point to are different from
the official SSA school that I'm familiar with: I see periods of
"strong labor" and "weak labor" situations; the abstract laws of
motion of capitalism (as I understand them) work out differently --
with different kinds of crises -- in these two types of eras. The
former situations seem more the exception than the rule, but can exist
due to strong labor institutions and a "nation-state-centric" growth
process. (Without the former, a nation-state-centric process under
capitalism might be fascism.)

For more, see my 1994 article in RESEARCH IN POLITICAL ECONOMY.
-- 
Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own
way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
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