Permanent Revolution replies to Brenner

Permanent Revolution has been doing a good job at critiquing those Marxist analyses that say capitalism has been stagnant or predict imminent economic meltdown. They've published a response to Robert Brenner's editorial view in Against the Current (here picked up by the Canadian New Socialist) that 'The current crisis could well turn out to be the most devastating since the Great Depression'.

Brenner says there's a crisis of over accumulation resulting from low profit rates going back to the 1970s. PR says he ignores the impact of the 'restoration of capitalism' in the old Eastern bloc and China, saying that allowed for a massive expansion of the world market in the early '90s - and allowing the last 5 years to be 'the strongest period of growth and stability in the world capitalist economy since the 1960s.' So PR thinks there's been an astonishing growth of capitalist manufacturing with the 'advent of globalisation'. And instead of seeing stagnation and falling profits they quotethe Goldman Sachs Global Economics Weekly from Jan 16th to say there has been a spectacular boom in global profits and corporate profit margins.