Nor is the lengthening work week. I'm suspicious of any claim about U.S. worker real wages that does not take up these issues. Brenner sees real wages as flat since ca. Hence the co-existence of robotics and MacJobs. Hence the inability of capitalism to seriously develop most of the world.
Labor power becomes too productive to be contained in capitalist social relations.
Devalorization has to occur to re-equilibrate the system for a new expansion at an acceptable rate of profit. And that process is hardly over, as the events of August-September 1998 showed. Perhaps Brenner disagrees. Brenner makes fairly uncritical use of mainstream statistics throughout. Here, in a nutshell, is my theory of crisis, from which the reader can measure my disagreement with Brenner, which may be ultimately more a question of emphasis, but a not unimportant one.