Can Income Redistribution Rescue Capitalism?

Description

Can Income Redistribution Rescue Capitalism?: On Monthly Review’s Factual and Theoretical Myths

By Andrew Kliman

Published by Marxist-Humanist Initiative, 2013. 71 pgs.

The claims made by the Monthly Review school have dominated the US Left’s thinking for decades, but the pamphlet argues that its account of the crisis, and others that similarly attribute the crisis to rising income inequality, are riddled with a great many serious deficiencies––factual, theoretical, and political. The pamphlet suggests that the crisis is instead rooted in the decades-long decline in profitability and associated problems within capitalist production. What is at stake is whether the prevalent Left goal of income redistribution could actually solve the current economic crisis and prevent the recurrence of similar crises. Before embracing such notions, it would do us all good to carefully scrutinize the factual and theoretical claims that underlie them.
 
Contents
* “More Misused Wage Data from Monthly Review: The Overaccumulation  of a Surplus of Errors”
* “‘The 99%’ and ‘the 1%’ … of What?”
* Selections from The Failure of Capitalist Production: Underlying Causes of the Great Recession: “The Underconsumptionist Intuition,” “Baran and Sweezy’s Logical Error,” “Whither Underconsumptionism?,” and “‘Trickle-Up’ Economics and its Political Implications”