The app for independent voices
Just seeing this now (I've been deep inside myself trying to finish the book, and perhaps also hiding from the world we currently live in).
I really appreciate the writeup, and I am especially thrilled to see your reference to Crotty (1993)! I've long tried to emulate Crotty's willingness to be the Keynesian in a room full of Marxists and the Marxist in a room full of Keynesians (and to do so not through "both sides" but through concrete analysis of American capitalism).
Naturally, I think of Crotty as closer to my own bricolaged Marx-Keynes-Kalecki-Minsky approach than he is to the Brenner/Riley version of economics. But the fact that the reply by Riley/Brenner takes for granted that Alvin Hansen and Jim Crotty are the best starting points is more important than the question of whose "side" he would have been on. Aaron Benanav deserves a lot of credit for bringing Crotty into the ken of the NLR stalwarts.
I also did not get a chance to say on the panel, but I am happy to state publicly here what I have already told @rileysociology, among others. I have to concede that I too "find Riley and Brenner’s theory more elegant and persuasive" than I did when I wrote my original response to their original theses. The centrality of gimmicks and ripoffs is extravagantly on display under the Trump clique, but it had already become clear during the madness of Diamond Joe. The other demented president's ultimate reliance, not on Jared Bernstein or Jen Harris or even Larry Summers, but on Hunter Biden and Jill Biden's majordomo, must be credited as a point in favor of Dylan Riley's "patrimonialism" analysis.
It won't surprise anyone that the Gaza genocide coincided with my negative reevalution of the seriousness of Bidenomics, but I maintain that this is not simply "mood affiliation." The way that figures like Jake Sullivan accepted (indeed, perpetrated) the genocide, in front of a world unified in horror, suggested to me that these were perhaps not people with a serious vision of hegemonic politics. They had no alternative besides lies and brutal violence for the Gaza "conflict," which is not the way one acts when one is actually in the business of building a new political economic order (as opposed to coming up with the most convenient possible way of linking Sullivan's priority - armed American primacy - with the domestic economic issues which were inconveniently forced to the surface by the tens of millions of Americans who supported Trump and/or Sanders in 2016, 2020, or 2024. ) Moreover, the inability of the left to make the slightest impact on Kamala's support for the genocide was a reality check about the ability of the left to pressure Biden-Harris into anything that required an actual confrontation between labor and capital, or even capital and the marketcrafting state.
When I first read the late Mike Davis's late essay "Thanatos Triumphant" (2022), I thought he was hysterical. My mistake: the man was and is right about everything. Read it and weep:
"no rational leader would sacrifice the 21st-century Russian economy to raise a faux double-eagle over the Dnieper. Indeed, no rational leader would...On the other shore, Biden conducts a nonstop seance with Dean Acheson and all the ghosts of Cold Wars past. The White House is visionless in the wilderness it helped to create. All the think tanks and genius minds that supposedly guide the Clinton-Obama wing of the Democratic Party are in their own way as lizard-brained as the soothsayers in the Kremlin. They can’t imagine any other intellectual framework for declining American power than nuclear-tipped competition with Russia and China. (One could almost hear the sigh of relief as Putin lifted the mental burden of having to think global strategy in the Anthropocene). In the end, Biden has turned out to be the same warmonger in power that we feared Hillary Clinton would be. Although Eastern Europe now distracts, who can doubt Biden’s determination to seek confrontation in the South China Sea – waters far more dangerous than the Black Sea?
Meanwhile the White House seems to have almost casually chucked its weak commitment to progressivism into the trash..."
He wrote all that before 10/7/23, of course. Mike Davis was not blind and visionless during his seances. While Jake Sullivan was busy memorizing Billy Joel lyrics, Mike channelled Leonard Cohen: "I've seen the future, brother: it is murder."
