Questions Concerning Technology; Arendt, 50 years later; Ukraine's Agony

Reading, Watching 12.07.25

This is a regular feature for paid subscribers wherein I write a little bit about what I’ve been reading and/or watching.

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The video of my lecture at the University of Chicago is now up. Thanks again to John McCormick, Lisa Wedeen, and the whole team there!

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My newsletter on the Robert Brenner and Dylan Riley event has sparked an enormous amount of controversy in the comments section! I just wanted to try and clear up a few things. Many readers expressed skepticism, if not downright incredulity, at the idea that profits in the advanced capitalist world have fallen at all over the course of the past 50 years. I think this is partly my fault, because I presented Riley and Brenner’s view in such a way that might sound like a simple repetition of the standard (and highly controversial) Marxian theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, which appears belied by the massive profits calculated by US corporations using standard accounting methods. (Keep in mind, I am not a trained economist or economic historian and am doing my best to understand this stuff, too.) The actual discussion in their piece is more complicated, relying on the concept of “secular stagnation” as developed by the Keynesian economist Alvin Hansen in the 1930s. This is a period of persistently low economic growth, which has plenty of empirical evidence and is discussed not just by heterodox economists but by the most mainstream voices like Larry Summers. (Yes, yes, I know, I know.—Not material to the discussion at hand!)

The authors:

Our point of departure in ‘Seven Theses’ was the observation that the Long Downturn that has gripped the world economy since the early 1970s has proved more persistent than many commentators expected. As Benanav notes, however, there is now a widening consensus among economic historians on the reality of stagnation. Robert Gordon has documented the mediocre performance of American Total Factor Productivity (TFP) since the 1970s, while Bradford DeLong highlights the ‘significant drop’ in worker-productivity growth for the 1973–2010 period. Ruchir Sharma notes that ‘productivity growth has slowed sharply since 1980’. In a similar vein Thomas Philippon argues that the slowdown in TFP growth ‘started in 2000 and is now widespread among rich countries’, adding that the Great Recession of 2008–09 ‘has probably reinforced this negative trend but it has not created it’. In ‘The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, the FT’s Martin Wolf avers: ‘Average productivity growth in the 2010s (between 2010 and 2019) became dismal in all high-income countries. This is important and depressing.’

Meanwhile, the secular trend of declining investment in OECD countries is, as Cédric Durand notes, ‘one of the least contested features of theadvanced-capitalist economies.’ Recent OECD data confirm the decline in net business investment, with the corporate sector ‘saving’—or payingout to shareholders—significantly more than it invested.

On the question of technology, I got one reader response that said I had missed that tech is intrinsic to Brenner/Riley’s argument:

1) technological development is, in fact, the main driver of Brenner’s argument, in the sense that it’s precisely new techniques of production that allow new firms (or countries) to constantly undercut each other. It’s a very Cohen-esque argument though in that technological development is presumed to be unilinear (2) “relations of production” are, in fact, amiss in Brenner, but this is by design: ironically - for something called “political Marxism” - Brenner’s approach situates relations between capitalists (i.e. competition) rather than class struggle as the motor of history.