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‘at the root of the crisis was, on the supply side, a crisis of labour which provoked a
crisis of profitability’(Lipietz 1992:315). Brenner and Glick’s particular
counterargument on stagnation via productivity recession in Fordist economies is that
regulationists largely equivocate that ‘after some given point in history,
machinofacture in general –in contrast to particular mechanized manufacturing
processes- should yield diminishing returns’(1991:100), however an even more
substantial counterargument is that they ‘offer no other systematic contradiction, or
source of capitalist crisis, except the ‘uneven development of Department I’ and
underconsumption’(ibid.:114).
Robert Brenner’s 1998 New Left Review piece had seemingly tugged away at the dust
sheets over a long adjourned quarrel within the Marxian theory of crisis. Brenner
argues that ‘reports of a cure for periodic economic crisis, indeed secular stagnation,
were premature’(1998:2) at a time when structural crises were back. This said, he is
particularly against the ‘consensus of today’s economists’ for whom the structural
crisis of the 1970s is a supply-side crisis. For the theory of supply-side crisis or ‘Full
Employment Profit Squeeze’, wage growth is the real crisis mechanism since it is
technically antithetical to stagnating levels of productivity growth. Of course, profit-
squeeze argument is that this antithetical wage growth stemmed from institutionalised
labour markets, social wage system and anti-Taylorist unionised labour as opposed to
tight labour markets; thereby, growth of wage income was not because not many were
employable at the time. In short, the profit-squeeze shibboleth is the ‘contradictions
of Keynesianism’. This is curiously very Kaleckian, though for Kalecki, the said
contradictions were not economic per se. To that effect, the profit-squeeze
‘consensus’ infracts from Kalecki with its ‘account of those institutional mechanisms
which, ..., provided the foundations of the postwar boom ... [and] the enhancement of
the power of labour and the citizenry [which] directly undermined the accumulation
process by bringing about a squeeze on profits’(ibid.:15). For Brenner, profit-squeeze
via wage growth, however, is not a broad enough mechanism of crisis, it is in fact ever
so tendencial because of certain ‘compensatory economic, political, and social
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