The very idea of you plowing through all that turgid Marxist prose, parsing every phrase and clause for contradictions and inconsistencies was rather amusing to me, but I appreciate you making the effort; especially when it got to the obligatory harangue at the end. Actually, you missed several boners I caught, but I still agree with most of what he says, although not necessarily the ideology that it allegedly justifies. I still hope you caught my point, that charts and tables and graphs and footnotes can be used to prove anything you want, and they can help convince you of what you wanted to believe in the first place. I noted your comments did not attack his data, just his conclusions. Still I'm not enough of an ideologue to completely reject an analysis because I find some holes in it, or to totally accept it because it answers some of my questions convincingly.

Actually, in one area I do agree completely with the authors: the repeated economic downturns of capitalist economies occur because they are divorced from the real function of an economy: the distribution of labor and resources to produce useful goods and services. The ascendancy of finance capitalism, which deals primarily with secondary, tertiary and quaternary abstractions far removed from work and product, and insteads seeks wealth by manipulating investment and interest and other intangibles leads inevitably to the kind of catastrophe we are slowly edging into.

Furthermore, failure to address the fundamental causes and results (the primary function of providing us with goods and employment) and instead dealing with these abstractions (fiddling with interest rates, monetary policy, etc) only postpones the problem, it does not settle it. This occurs primarily because financial machinations are more profitable, less risky, and more prestigious than actually building things and competing in the marketplace to sell them. Although I do not immediately reject the usefulness of credit, the value of investments and the role of banking, it should never become an end in itself. When it does, it becomes parasitic on the economy as a whole. I feel about financial capitalism pretty much the way you feel about government bureacracy: A little bit is good, too much is not. An economy controlled by finance capital is little better than one controlled by professional central planners. Not only is it incapable of self-regulation, the personalities involved cannot be trusted with other people's money.

As for his comments on the role of class, the divorcing of politics from economics (or at least the doctrine that they are independent), and the trivialization of political economy into a self-justifying academic game of abstractions, mathematics and theory, I agree whole-heartedly. Other than a few obvious and self-evident truisms, like the law of supply and demand, economics is not physics, it is more like engineering, it is a human artifact. We're not talking about blind forces here, we are looking at the social relations human beings adopt in order to organize themselves to provide the things they need to survive. They change historically both because of changing conditions AND conscious decisions by people. Things are the way they are because we made them that way, whether by accident or deliberately. We are allowed to fiddle with the system when it stops working for us. The real question is whether should those who currently benefit from the system be the only ones enabled to decide.