Over the past twenty-five years, UCLA economic historian Robert Brenner, a longtime contributor to the New Left Review, has developed an increasingly influential theory of what he calls “the long downturn” — the global economic slowdown that began in 1973 with the passing of the postwar boom.

In Brenner’s account, for a half century the world economy has stagnated under the weight of a long crisis of profitability caused by chronic overcapacity in global manufacturing — a problem that first made itself felt with the postwar reentry of German and Japanese firms into already-saturated export markets, but which has only gotten worse with time.

For Brenner, chronic overcapacity is the symptom of a flaw in the economic mechanism of capitalism, arising from the unplanned anarchy of market production: firms in overcrowded industries, saddled with sunk costs in the form of fixed capital, lack the incentive to withdraw from unprofitable lines of business, resulting in intractable pileups of excess capacity that breed cutthroat competition, sinking profit rates, and, ultimately, stagnation.