Who has a better understanding of economics?

siamdave:

I went to that page and did a little bit of reading. He's close but is msissing some important points.

What happened in the 70s was that be the 60s the surplus value extracted from labour power through the assmeble line; died out. Capitalisms world growth became stagnet. A new theory had to be introduced to improve profits.

After WWII the capitalists were able to prop up capitalims with Keynes theory of capitalism only because of the surplus value extracted by the American production methods. As I said, this died by the 1960s.

But also during this time, the world over the leaders of the woking class started to purge to more militant elements from their organzations.

By the 1970s World Capitalaist took on the theory of Friedman. This being, to increase profits in a world of stagnation, cut taxes and divert that money to profit, deregulate and lower wages.

By 1980 you had England, USa and Canada going full force attacking the working class and the working class leadership playing along. Just look athe Reagan and the Air Traffic Cantrollers. He fire the lot of them and were was the working class rebelion?

Well you can't have a rebelion if there are no rebels and no theory to back the rebelion up.

9. Let me turn now to the analysis of this crisis based on the method of Marxism. Such an analysis must be grounded on the laws of capitalist economy and an understanding of the interaction between these laws and the historical development of capitalism, that they both condition and within which they operate. The bourgeois economist Joseph Schumpeter, much in vogue these days because of his notion of “creative destruction” under capitalism, was an opponent of Marxism. But he had a great appreciation of Marx’s method of analysis and his achievements. “There is … one thing of fundamental importance for the methodology of economics which he [Marx] actually achieved,” he wrote. “Economists always have either themselves done work in economic history or else used the historical work of others. But the facts of economic history were consigned to a separate compartment. They entered theory, if at all, merely in the role of illustrations, or possibly of verifications of results. They mixed with it only mechanically. Now Marx’s mixture is a chemical one: that is to say, he introduced them into the very argument that produces the results. He was the first economist of top rank to see and to teach systematically how economic theory may be turned into historical analysis and how the historical narrative may be turned into histoire raisonnée.”[4]

11. Trotsky’s analysis was developed both against these conceptions and a “left” interpretation which maintained that since the breakdown of 1914, capitalism was destined to suffer a never-ending downturn. Contrary to the assertions of the “lefts”, Trotsky explained that there were clear signs of an upturn and they would strengthen. But that said nothing about the historical viability of the capitalist system. It merely demonstrated that capitalism was alive and continued to “breathe”, just as a man continues to breathe up to the moment of his death. Capitalism was still alive, but there would be no return to the phase of capitalist expansion that had preceded World War I and in fact any boom would soon create the conditions for a new and deeper economic crisis

26. The title of this lecture refers to the breakdown of capitalism. I hope my remarks have made it clear what is meant by this. A breakdown does not signify that the capitalist economy simply stops. Far from it. It signifies the opening of a new period of history in which the fate of society is decided for decades to come. How does that take place? Not by legislation or regulation but through the eruption of enormous social and class struggles. These struggles will assume revolutionary dimensions: the ruling classes can no longer rule in the old ways and the working class cannot live under the new conditions that are being imposed.