Thread by @MaxJerneck

There is a strain within fiscal sociology, perhaps even its dominant one, that depicts the capitalist state as "structurally poor," with the implication that if socialists were to seize it, it wouldn't make much of a difference.

Here is Goldschied (1958):

Other examples include Offe's "The fiscal crisis of the state" (1973), and Wolfgang Streeck's "Re-Forming Capitalism" (2009). It's a fundamentally pessimistic view, holding that social democracy will undermine itself unless it achieves a complete break with capitalist relations

Miliband's "The State in Capitalist Society" (1969) reads like it was written by a neoliberal, in that investment is fickle and entirely dependent upon the level of confidence among capitalists, so the state has no choice but to cater to their needs.

Chartalism breaks with this narrative, which is why many consider it liberating. But many Marxists are skeptical. The relations that determine the power over spending are, to them, not as real as the class relations of production. To them, money is a veil, not a social relation.

That's why they are skeptical of Keynesism, which can only "paper over" class relations, not change them. Perry Anderson's NLR article about Obama is telling, pointing to the futility of "lame Keynesianism" in 2009 but never explaining why real Keynesianism wouldn't have worked.

I may have been unfair in this thread, but this is the general sense I have picked up from my perspective during the past 10 years

And it’s not just Marxists. Michael Mann, who has written thousands of pages on the power of ideology, says that Northern Europe was not affected by neoliberalism because they *had* to cut welfare spending - it wasn’t ideologically motivated! It was the fiscal crisis of the state