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mechanisms that are set of, more or less automatically ... we therefore need a theory of
a malign invisible hand’(ibid.:23).
However, the real bite is in another piece of ridicule Brenner has against the supply-
side theories. Contra Glyn, Panitch and regulationists, he argues that from late 1950s
and mid-1960s onwards, it was the capitalists that had been the feverish aggressors in
the dramatic harassment of unionised labour. In fact, the consequences of that openly
truculent traducement have been quite stark in that the unionised segments vis-a-vis
the non-unionised segments of working class have since considerably decreased as did
the wage increases the former has negotiated in contrast to those of the latter in most
industrialised economies. In Brenner’s words, ‘workers’ resistance was unable to
prevent manufacturers employers from securing major reductions in the growth of
wages during the 1960s and early 1970s, as manufacturing real wage increase between
1965 and 1973 was more than a third lower than that between 1948 and
1965’(2005:227). Thereby, Full Employment Profit Squeeze theory, especially in its
contradictions of Keynesianism format, is counterfactual and theoretically unsound
since even this systematic and colossal capitalist calumny against the working class
and lowered levels of social or otherwise wage growth has not extinguished the
declining profitability of industrial sectors and, secondly, since the second world war
trade unions and social-democratic parties, insofar as these were truly working class
institutions, had generally bullied the proleterianised segments of the society toward a
strict imprimatur with the schedule of businesses and plans for a wage drogue
especially when employees themselves were gallant about a further increase in their
income(Brenner 1998:21,139).
Brenner then analyses the terms of secular capitalist stagnation as ‘producers ... take
remedial action that fails to bring about an adjustment and ends up exacerbating the
difficulties of the initial situation’ with ‘the tendency of producers to develop the
productive forces and increase economic productiveness by means of installation of
increasingly cheap and effective methods of production, without regard for existing
investments and their requirements for realization, with the result that aggregate
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