Secular stagnation debate in the light of Marxist and Marx - inspired theories

Abstract

Since Larry Summers's speech at the 2013 IMF Research Conference the secular stagnation debate has been pervasive both among scholars and policy makers. Indeed, during most of the 2010s central capitalist economies have been marked by low to moderate growth rates. As of the end of 2019 economic fragility was acknowledged by economists of virtually every corner of the theoretical spectrum. Existing investigations and critiques of the mainstream secular stagnation hypothesis (mainly those put forward by Larry Summers and Robert Gordon) have been especially elaborated and discussed within the post-Keynesian and post-Kaleckian camps, while Marxists and Marxist-inspired theories have been left aside. There are no attempts to systematize recent Marxist elaborations that can serve as alternatives to the dominant secular stagnation debate. Having in mind both the possibility to reinterpret the "new" secular stagnation through the Marxist prism and the need to call the attention of Marxist authors for the relevance of the matter, the present work aims to review and present a sample of the Marxist recent debate as an alternative for interpreting the "new" secular stagnation. We adopt the supply-side/demand-side divide as a guide for the systematization of the contributions, which in the marxist theory appears respectively as the problem of production and the problem of realization. We study five theoretical currents: the first, post-Kaleckian/Steindlian, converses more directly with post-Keynesian perspectives. We use mainly the works of Christina Anselmann and Eckhard Hein. The other are more clearly Marxist or Marxist inspired: the Monopoly Capital tradition, introduced by Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran and often associated with the Monthly Review; The Temporal Single-System Interpretation (TSSI); the Social Structures of Accumulation (SSA) perspective; and the Uno-Sekine variant of the Japanese Unoist tradition. We believe in this way to have evidenced in the Marxist camp there is rich and ample literature capable of offering a systemic comprehension of the "new" secular stagnation, thus going beyond the, admittedly crucial, macroeconomic sphere and the reformist approach to capitalism.