The crisis of bourgeois economics

[PinkoCommie]

The whole of this piece is a worthwhile read even if it is now almost 15 years old. Here though are some germane excerpts for those who might be hung up on "free enterprise" and similar monikers; hopefully, they'll encourage you to read the whole piece and come back to discuss your impressions:

The pre-Keynesian economic orthodoxy was what is normally called the 'neo-classical' or 'marginalist' school (although, confusingly, Keynes in his own writings usually referred to it as 'the classical school'). This arose in the 1870s and 1880s out of attempts by the Austrians Menger and Boehm Bawerk, the Englishmen Jevons and Marshall, the Frenchman Walras, the Italian Pareto, and the American Clark to resolve problems which had beset mainstream economists over the previous half century.4

Until then economists had relied on the ideas of the Scottish economist of the mid-18th century, Adam Smith, and the English economist of the early 19th century, David Ricardo. Smith and Ricardo had written at a time when modern capitalism was still fighting for supremacy with old landed and mercantile interests. Their main concerns had been with what encouraged the wealth of society to grow and what determined its distribution between the different classes in society*especially between the rising capitalist class and the old landowners. They saw an objective measure of value as a precondition for coming to terms with these issues. Smith suggested it was to be found in labour, although he failed to develop the idea consistently. Ricardo went further, and built his whole system around the notion.

But Ricardo left succeeding bourgeois economists with two major problems. One was theoretical: to explain how profits could be averaged out between industries which employed the same amount of capital but different amounts of labour.5 The other was ideological: how to provide some account, other than the robbery of one class by another, to justify the existence of profit at all. Otherwise, they would not be able to prevent radical critics of existing society from turning Ricardo's system into an attack not just on landowners but on capitalism as a whole.

For half a century bourgeois economists floundered as they tried to deal with both problems. As Marx pointed out, they alternated between a scholasticism which consisted in merely repeating abstract expressions from Ricardo, without showing how they related to concrete reality, and abandoning Ricardo's insights so as to apologise for profit. In either case, they abandoned the scientific approach to be found in Smith and Ricardo, which at least attempted to cut through superficial appearances to find underlying causes, in favour of a shallow 'vulgar economics'.

The marginalists took this process a stage further. They proclaimed they could cut through all the problems in Ricardo's system by dropping the very idea of an objective measure of value as mistaken.

But they did not reject everything said by Smith and Ricardo. They enthusiastically embraced those of their contentions which seemed to justify the untrammelled play of market forces*for instance Adam Smith's 'hidden hand' view that the best way to serve the general good was to allow free competition between producers whose only concern was with their individual interests, and Ricardo's 'theory of comparative advantage' defence of free trade. At the same time, they put at the centre of their system a 'law' promulgated by the French economist Jean-Baptiste Say and accepted by Ricardo. This held that generalised crises of overproduction were impossible because 'supply created its own demand'. The extra value of the goods produced by any firm over and above material costs, Say said, was equal to the wages paid to its workers plus the profit paid to the capitalist. So for the economy as a whole, the total amount in people's pockets from wages and profits must be exactly the same as the amount needed to buy all goods that had been produced.

Slumps, then, were logically impossible unless for some reason, a group of people were refusing to sell the goods at their disposal or to spend the money in their pockets. John Stuart Mill had expressed the prevailing view some 20 years before the marginalists developed their own ideas:

Each person's means for paying for the production of other people consists in those [commodities] that he himself possesses. All sellers are inevitably by the meaning of the word buyers... A general over-supply...of all commodities above the demand is...an impossibility... People must spend their...savings...productively; that is, in employing labour.6

The marginalists were only too happy to incorporate this view as a central feature of their own system. Where they broke with the Smith-Ricardo tradition was over what the main concern of economics should be. What mattered to them was not the creation of wealth and its distribution between classes, but rather showing that the fixing of prices through the market, without conscious human intervention, automatically led to the most efficient way of running an economy. And so they abandoned the old view of value, with its concentration on the objective necessity of labour for production...


Keynes was a trenchant critic of the notion now, popular in ruling circles once more, that the 'free market' system could automatically solve all of humanity's problems. He insisted again and again that the answer to unemployment was not to cut wages, or to provide the rich with 'incentives' for saving. And on occasions his talk of the evils of the 'free market' could sound very radical indeed. So, for instance, in a lecture in Dublin in 1933, he lambasted the orthodox economic view:

We have to remain poor because it does not 'pay' to be rich. We have to live in hovels, not because we cannot build palaces, but because we 'cannot afford' them... With what we have spent on the dole in England since the war we could have made our cities the greatest works of man in the world... Our economic system is not enabling us to exploit to the utmost the possibilities for economic wealth afforded by the progress of our technique.39

In The General Theory he is scathing about the idea that interest is a reward for the abstinence of the saver, insisting that 'interest today rewards no genuine sacrifice, any more than does the rent of land', and goes on to urge the gradual 'euthanasia' of the 'rentier' who lives off dividends.40

Yet he did not regard any of this as implying, in any sense, a revolutionary challenge to the existing economic system. 'In some respects,' he argued, his theory was 'moderately conservative in its implications'.41 All that was needed for the existing system to work was for the existing state to disregard the old orthodoxy and to intervene in economic life to raise the level of spending on investment and consumption. Two sorts of measures were necessary.

First, he argued, governments could intervene in money markets to drive down the rate of interest. This would both encourage better off people to spend rather than save their incomes, so providing a market for the output of others and encourage firms to invest*although, Keynes noted, he was 'somewhat sceptical of the success of a merely monetary policy directed towards influencing the rate of interest'.42

Second, governments could undertake direct expenditures of their own, to be financed by borrowing. Such 'deficit financing' would increase the demand for goods and so the level of employment. It would also pay for itself eventually through a 'multiplier effect' (discovered by Keynes' Cambridge colleague Kahn). The extra workers who got jobs because of government expenditures would spend their wages, so providing a market for the output of other workers, who in turn would spend their wages and provide still bigger markets. And as the economy expanded closer to its full employment level, the government's revenue from taxes on incomes and spending would rise, until it was enough to pay for the previous increase in expenditure.

These two measures were soon seen as the archetypical 'Keynesian' tools for getting full employment. It was these that both conservative and social democratic politicians took for granted as the key to economic management in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s.

At some points in The General Theory Keynes seemed to look to more radical forms of state intervention. The state, he argued, was 'in a position to calculate' the long term results of investment, and so could take 'an ever greater responsibility for directly organising investment...'43 'I conceive' he argued,'that a somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment will prove the only means of securing an approximation to full employment'.44 But even this did not depend on 'state socialism', since 'it is not the ownership of the instruments of production which it is important for the state to assume.'

If the state simply determined 'the aggregate resources' to be devoted to new investments, 'it will have accomplished all that is necessary'.45 So there was the possibility of 'all manner of compromises and devices by which the public authority will co-operate with private initiative', bringing about the necessary changes 'gradually and without a break in the general traditions of society'.

The 'socialisation of investment' would follow inevitably as low interest rates weakened the position of bondholders, while industrialists, dependent on government stimulation of the economy, allowed it to play an increasingly central role. There would be no need for any sort of radical break with the past.

So unrevolutionary did Keynes conceive such change to be, that he argued that once it was in place, the existing economic orthodoxy would then be applicable:

If our central controls succeed in establishing...full employment...the classical theory comes into its own again... Then there is no objection...against the classical analysis of the manner in which private interest will determine what in particular is produced, in what proportions the factors of production will be combined to produce it, and how the value of the final product will be divided between them...46

Reform versus revolution

Keynes believed his approach was the only one which could save capitalism from itself and win young people from the lure of Marxism. A friend of Keynes at Cambridge, Julian Bell, described in 1933 how the student body was pulled sharply to the left under the impact of the world economic crisis and the rise of fascism in Europe:

In the Cambridge that I first knew in 1929 and 1930...as far as I can remember we hardly ever talked or thought about politics. By the end of 1933 we have arrived at a situation in which the only subject of discussion is contemporary politics, and which a very large majority of the more intelligent undergraduates are Communists or almost Communists.47

This state of affairs horrified Keynes, 'who was scathing in his attacks on Marxism'. He told Bell that Communism was a 'religion', and that 'Marxism was the worst of all, and founded on a mistake of old Mr Ricardo's'.48 He claimed in a letter to Bernard Shaw at the beginning of 1935 that his new theory would 'knock away...the Ricardian foundations of Marxism'.49 Later in the year he told students, 'Marxism...was complicated hocus pocus, the only value of which was its muddleheadedness.'

He put his argument rather more logically during a series of lectures outlining his new theory in 1934. Marxism, he argued, was wrong because it accepted, as much as the neo-classical orthodoxy, that state intervention could not improve the operations of capitalism:

The Marxists have become the ultra-orthodox economists. They take the Ricardian argument to show that nothing can be gained from interference. Hence, since things are bad and mending is impossible, the only solution is to abolish [capitalism] and have quite a new system. Communism is the logical outcome of the classical theory.50

He believed his 'general theory' showed how capitalism could be saved by relatively simple reforms, and that therefore the Marxists were fundamentally mistaken. It was an argument some at least of the 1930s left wing intellectuals accepted, especially as they became disillusioned with Stalinism after the Stalin-Hitler pact in 1939. And it was a view which spread when the boom of the post-war failed to give way to the imminent slump many predicted.

In Britain, John Strachey had been by far the best known Marxist writer on economics in the 1930s. His The Nature of the Capitalist Crisis, The Coming Struggle for Power and The Theory and Practice of Socialism had taught Marxist economics to a whole generation of worker activists and young intellectuals. Yet by 1956 he was arguing, in his Contemporary Capitalism, that Keynes had been right and Marx wrong on the crucial question of whether the capitalist crisis could be reformed away: 'There are no specifically economic fallacies in the Keynesian case... If the Keynesian remedies can be applied they will have broadly the predicted effects'.51

Keynes's only mistake, Strachey held, was that he thought the capitalists or their political parties would introduce such remedies of their own volition. In fact it required pressure from below, from the workers' parties and unions. 'The Keynesian remedies...will be opposed by the capitalists certainly: but experience shows they can be imposed by the electorate'.52 Keynes helped 'the democratic and democratic socialist forces to find a way of continuously modifying the system, in spite of the opposition of the capitalist interests... And in doing so he helped show the peoples of the West a way forward which did not lead across the bourne of total class war...'53

Strachey was articulating what became the conventional social democratic argument throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Capitalism had experienced a deep slump in the inter-war years and governments had been unable to cope. But this was not because of the intrinsic faults of capitalism as a system. It was because governments had adopted the wrong policies, imprisoned by a hidebound doctrine that led them to cut public expenditure and wages, pushing down consumption when really the need was to do the opposite. They need never make the mistake again, now that Keynes's theory had provided them with a new intellectual tool for understanding what was happening. Indeed, it was said, British governments need not have made the mistake in the inter-war years themselves since, even before he published The General Theory, Keynes had advised them against going on the Gold Standard in 1926 and cutting public expenditure to balance the budget in 1931.

It is an argument which people like The Observer editor Will Hutton try to revive today when they argue that, if only governments would abandon 'dogma' and follow in Keynes's footsteps, there would be an alternative to economic crisis and social deterioration. But there is one glaring fault with this argument. It does not take into account what really happened, either in the inter-war years or during the long post-war boom.
http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj71/harman.htm

[anaxarchos]

If we want to talk about economics, let's start with something that makes a serious stab at it. The article is not without its weaknesses. Harmon gives too much weight to the issues of Marx's day (some of them have "evolved"), he gives too much coherence to Keynes (the man was infamous for being on all sides of the same question) and there is a lot to quibble with in the details... BUT, it as good a start as we'll get if we wanna talk about "Economics" in the context of the last 50 years (as opposed to the last 5 years, which is common and nearly worthless).

So, try this on Mr. PC.

"The Marxists have become the ultra-orthodox economists. They take the Ricardian argument to show that nothing can be gained from interference. Hence, since things are bad and mending is impossible, the only solution is to abolish and have quite a new system. Communism is the logical outcome of the classical theory.50

He believed his 'general theory' showed how capitalism could be saved by relatively simple reforms, and that therefore the Marxists were fundamentally mistaken."

So, let me take the most controversial position:

1) Keynes was essentially right.

2) It doesn't matter because it changes nothing, thus negating his rightness.

3) The only remaining residue is, "Communism is the logical outcome of the classical theory."

What say you to each?

[Political Heretic]

...looking at my night tonight and morning tomorrow, its unclear when that will happen.

But I'm looking forward to giving it a read.
Cheers,
PH

[Kid of the Black Hole]

because I can't think of anyone else who agrees with all three of those points

[anaxarchos]

You don't?

Fine... Make your case.

[Kid of the Black Hole]

just saying that there is no one ELSE. You've explained some things about Keynes to me before.

But your thesis catches flak from both sides. "Keynes was right", "Keynes was wrong" and "Ricardo was wrong" for good measure

I think Ricardo's thesis looks righter by the day personally..

[anaxarchos]

Keynes is exactly right. A few "simple reforms", like "socializing investment", preventing over-production through central planning - which as a side effect decides "winners and losers", spreading the "misery" among the capitalists as a whole, the creation of a state sector responsible for "full employment" on the one hand, and deciding which industries can no longer "compete" on the other... sure "it works", if all other capitalist countries also spontaneously decide to "co-operate" and not take advantage of this "uncompetitiveness" for "social purposes". And, oh yes, the bourgeoisie will not mind the usurpation of their political state in order to impose the exact opposite of what was intended...

Keynes is the ultimate middle-class twit. Once everyone knows what he knows, of course they will all abandon their partisanship in favor of his recipe... for the greater good, of course... of the bourgeoisie in general.

Whoever heard of the bourgeoisie in general? It's about private interest, you schmuck. Of course Ricardo is right. He was no "liberal" either but he had the great advantage of getting to the game early when the issues of the future remained as abstractions.

Neither does one have to "read books" to understand any of this. One can turn on the television and watch it all play out right before one's eyes... right now, as we speak. Or one can pick up the NY Times and listen to Paul Krugman, who wouldn't have the nerve to propose 1% of Keynes' "simple remedies", constantly frustrated that not a soul is interested in implementing his "simple" but lame proposals... unbelievable! What a bunch of Bozos. They make Robert Owen look like a realist.

What is interesting is the distillation of Keynes by Harmon which basically says that the social science of economics IS Marxism, according to Keynes.

Well, I guess that doesn't have to be true. If one could spontaneously levitate all the corn in Iowa, suck it in through their ears, magically transform it into pixie dust, shoot it out their ass like a comet, around Saturn and make it come back to earth as rational bourgeois collective feeling in say a generation or two... THEN, maybe...

But, otherwise...

[Kid of the Black Hole]

why America is and looks to remain the worlds lone "superpower" while Western Europe remains a junior partner. As everywhere they look to roll back social spending..

[Username]

Subtle nudges are not going to be effective.


To me, it's almost (but not completely) meaningless as to how some of these things that are talked about relate to our current situation. Sure, it matters whether these things are true or not, and which is more correct than the other, but other than that, how can it have so much relevance.

We do not have an economy that is ANYTHING like what is discussed there. At least not in my view.

There are 200 trillion dollars worth of default credit swaps, held by our financial institutions, that were created (produced?) in the last 8 years. That's about 15 times our GDP.

We have a government that is giving trillions in cash to somebody, for nothing, it seems, and we don't even know who they are giving it to.


Is anything like that talked about by Marx, or Smith, or Keynes, or even Freidman for that matter?

I'm just wondering if any of those guys ever mentioned anything like that before now.

And, if they didn't, I'm sort of wondering why not, if what they did talk about is supposed to be so on point.

And, I'm also wondering if the answers to these reservations are material or not. I understand we don't want to reinvent the wheel and all, but is anybody here sure that there exists a wheel that will get us out of the mess we're in?

[anaxarchos]

Not only does it invite one of a thousand obvious responses ("Who cares about Newtonian Physics anyway... Nobody sits under apple trees anymore and he never had an iPhone"), but more importantly, it challenges contemporary wisdom. There isn't a single political party or government in the world today which doesn't think that Keynes is relevent to what is happening currently... even if they take the opposite view.

Now you are on the other side of common knowledge. It falls on you to demonstrate how credit default swaps change "ANYTHING" in a fundamental way and thus make discussions about the theories of such dead people, moot.

Alternatively, you are simply channeling Protagoras, who is an even older dead guy.

http://www.phillwebb.net/History/Ancient/Protagoras/Protagoras.jpg

[PraxMan]

but that's OK...Americans don't know much about history and treat the world as if it was a supermarket; pushing their cart down an aisle and picking out products they like to eat.

At no time, except in the addled minded American tradition did anyone on the REAL LEFT THINK Keynes was a radical and not a bourgeois economist, so what exactly is the point of this garbage other than to point out that very stupid people who never bothered reading Keynes' 'bourgeois economics' continue to use it as a straw man to push American 'bourgeois economics'...like libertarianism, monetarism, cronyism or whatever a bunch of lobbyists decide is an 'ism' to the current crop of American idiots pushing their poison...like Reaganism or Thatcherism.

(psst...libertarianism is a political movement and not an economic theory...dumb ass)

[PraxMan]

Why not ask him to explain Keynes' multiplier effect?

Last time I looked that Keynes theory was bedrock in American capitalist theory?

"If you build it, they will come!"

dumb asses leading dumb asses...

Protagoras?
Why is it that American references are either the Bile or ancient Greeks and Romans?
Answer: Your hardwired for fascism.

[anaxarchos]

He is or was on the Central Committee of the British Socialist Workers Party. He is also an economist (from the LSE). The Trot usually shows through, but not so much in this article.

Who is a Libertarian?

(psst... another outburst you are either going to retreat from, or make up some convoluted shit to support).

[anaxarchos]

You are a waste of time. Let's just avoid each other.

[Two Americas]

And you are calling others stupid and dumbass?

[Username]

I think the piece assumes that there will be some controls. By modifying those controls things can be made to be more predictable. What some of the controls are, how effective they are, is what I got out of the piece. My question was, is there any prediction of what happens when those controls are gone, or ignored, or not used? That seems to be the question of where we are right now, or at least where we are headed, isn't it?

As for the CDS question and whether or not it changes anything, I'm not saying it does or doesn't, I just assumed it would since the salaries and bonuses have to come from somewhere. Also, it caused a big brouha which would have been unecessary if nothing changed.


From what I understand about Keynes, his approach is accurate. If it is accurate, then I don't know how someone "opposes" that, unless they can come up with something that is more accurate.

As far as Newton, I would ask what gravity has to do with baking bread, other than keeping the dough in the pan? Or do you think it's time to make bread yet?

[anaxarchos]

There is your convoluted shit. A minute ago he was a "Libertarian" and now that shit is forgotten. On to the next....

You don't know jack, except how to posture. You want the last word, pompous ignorant asshole? It's yours.

[Username]

I found the whole story to be so on point that it's hard to find a place to begin. Besides the title, I find the story line to be appropriate. The way the innovation occurred, everything finally going well and then a kid throws a rock into the works and something completely different results. And I thought the whole Poor Richard style was hilarious. It made me belly laugh. I think I just made you shudder. Also, the way the character became more and more sophisticated. I just think it is an appropriate story. I should have made this response over there when you asked me about it, but with all the spamming and everything. I admit I handled it rather poorly. It's as if people are expecting to get something accomplished here or something. I think the spammers should go. It contributes absolutely nothing other than disruption and in most places message board spammers are considered to be the lowest form of life on the internet. I guess here it is tolerated so that the lowest spot can be reserved for -- fill in the blank --

I wish I had it to do over again.

[PraxMan]

Message moved to "T!me Out to Chill Out" forum. You can visit it [link:www.progressiveindependent.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=217&topic_id=152 | here] .

[PraxMan]

Message moved to "T!me Out to Chill Out" forum. You can visit it [link:www.progressiveindependent.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=217&topic_id=153 | here] .

[meganmonkey]

"Keynes's only mistake, Strachey held, was that he thought the capitalists or their political parties would introduce such remedies of their own volition. In fact it required pressure from below, from the workers' parties and unions. 'The Keynesian remedies...will be opposed by the capitalists certainly: but experience shows they can be imposed by the electorate'.52 Keynes helped 'the democratic and democratic socialist forces to find a way of continuously modifying the system, in spite of the opposition of the capitalist interests... And in doing so he helped show the peoples of the West a way forward which did not lead across the bourne of total class war...'53"

But boy am I learning a lot and I'm starting to see how things are fitting together.

"...experience shows they can be imposed by the force of the electorate..."

Uh, yeah, sure...

Okay back to reading this in full...

[anaxarchos]

Keynes' "simple remedies" are politically unacceptable. You don't have to believe me. You can turn on your TV. Not even the "left-wing" Stiglitz or Krugman have even approached proposals to "socialize investment". Not even the "Socialist" from Vermont, Sanders, has broached the issue. And socialized investment doesn't go nearly far enough to fully "control" the actual recessionary cycle. Even the least controversial Keynesian proposal - his monetary policy - is not reasonably supported by Republicans, Blue Dogs, The Obama "Team", or Liberals. The Keynesian Policy has gone backwards from the 1940s, even as the technical acknowledgement of its accuracy is once again accepted.

Then there is the underlying cause of economic crisis which has historically been resolved between, rather than within, national economies. Keynes doesn't even address that. The irony here is that Keynes sets out to "prove" that Capitalist crisis is not inevitable and ends up proving exactly the opposite.

On your "controls" issue, controls are like civil liberties whenever a crisis is deemed to occur. They are the first to go when they are supposed to be the most important. Economic crisis is structural but expressed as a speculative "bubble" (every time). The bubble is caused by a lack of outlet for Capital. Under such conditions, "controls" are a check dam standing against a raging flood. In this recession, two thirds of the CDSs were traded on "private markets" which were entirely unregulated, precisely to sidestep "controls".


Finally there is the issue of baking bread. The subject was Economics and Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Keynes and some additional dead guys, are all important to Economics, just as Newton is to Physics. As far as the baking analogy goes, Economics in turn determines whether we are baking bread or Alaska King Crabs. The answer matters a great deal.

[anaxarchos]

... as the U.K. is in the process of nationalizing shipyards, car factories, steel mills, airlines and giving up the Empire wholesale. That colonialism would inevitably be replaced by neo-colonialism and that the nationalized industries would be starved and eventually re-privatized under Thatcher... only to be shut down for good... none of this was obvious at the time. The bankruptcy of the U.K. at the end of WW2 was a moderate Socialist/Labor Party guy's Nirvana.

Of course, their idea of pressure from "worker's parties and unions" wasn't that different from Obama's "grassroots mobilization" to support his healthcare bill by calling up his donor list...

[meganmonkey]

I'm now to the part right before my favorite, Hayek is discussed, looking forward to that ha ha. I already know I'll need to re-read the whole thing to get a better understanding of the differences in these theories because it is like a foreign language to me...

What strikes me at this point, in terms of general overall impressions, is that trying to discuss Marxism in the most vague way results in reactions like 'academic' 'ivory tower' 'out of touch with reality' etc...but in reading how these various Kenyesian theories develop, the assumptions on which they are based, the way substantial criticisms are brushed off, it occurs to me that these theories, the very ones that influenced our economic policies for a century, are far removed from reality- current events are picked through so those which help 'prove' something are used and any contradictory is discarded...and worst of all there seems to be NO accounting for the fact that we aren't starting from a perfect blank slate where any of these ideas can actually be tested in a real way...(this was always my problem with Hayek in my Social Theory class way back when, little did I know...). They are pure theory and the foundations in reality are nonexistent.

Whereas Marx takes into account where we are (or where we were in his time, I suppose) how we got here, and even after all this time has passed and conditions, by some measurements, have changed considerably, his theory still holds water...and accounts for a transition and, of course, a change in the relations of power and social conditions.

Anyway, I have a long way to go before I really even know what I'm trying to say here, but this article is really good.

:)

ps and boy that Von Mises crap about unemployment being an indication of people wanting more fucking leisure really pisses me off. How out of touch with reality can someone be? I guess it depends on how much money they have in the bank. Grrr...

[meganmonkey]

"The radicals have the easier case to make. They have only to point to the discrepancies between the operation of the modern economy and the ideas by which it is supposed to be judged, while the conservatives have the well nigh impossible task of demonstrating that this is the best of all possible worlds. For the same reason, however, the conservatives are compensated by occupying positions of power, which they can use to keep criticism in check... The conservatives do not feel obliged to answer radical criticisms on their merits and the argument is never fairly joined.138"

Like the sun shining through parting clouds...

[Two Americas]

It always strikes me as odd to see liberals and Democrats struggle to communicate their message, get so frustrated and then lose so many arguments with conservatives. They believe that the conservative message is the easier one to deliver and explain and promote. There is probably a connection between the two.

[anaxarchos]

... about people like me (i.e. "radicals", i.e. "commies"). She was writing in 1981 and was not talking about "Liberals and Democrats"... not even the revived "mixed system" or lame-assed "social democrats" of the present day. They didn't exist at that time.

Liberals and Democrats don't have an economic argument and sit significantly below the "Conservatives". What the Conservatives say is that, "Free enterprise is the best system and creates the most wealth and gives you your only opportunity to get rich and even if all that isn't true, you aren't gonna change it anyway. There will never be a revolution and the best you will ever get is corruption, feather bedding by various Liberals, endless bureaucracy and nothing but stagnation for your troubles. You might as well bet on your individual chance to crawl up the social pyramid on your lonesome, ignoring everyone else in the process because you have no other choices." Against the Liberals, it is a devastating indictment.

What do the Liberals say in return? At best they dig up the imagery of a 60 year dead president under the most unusual of circumstances. Today, even that is not a remote possibility. Liberals, even "radical liberals", have no stomach for anything like that. The Obama regime and its critics are proof positive of that simple fact. What is their most radical criticism of the current situation?

"We need regulation." ... As if that call hadn't been made since J.S. Mill and Bentham, 150 years ago. With what actual result?

"They are a conspiracy bent on stealing." ... Fookin' shocking Capitalism, obviously in need of "exposing"... in the "MSM", maybe? All of this most "radical" sounding criticism ends with a whimper when the subject gets to what to do about it. Regulation? Congressional hearings?

"We have to wage a war against greed..." How? Sensitivity training? Yoga? More female, black and Hispanic executives? Green industries?

It's all fucking ridiculous. The Conservatives have a field day with this shit. "You might as well take your chances with pure unadulterated Capitalism because they won't change shit. In the process, they will raise your taxes, close off the last opportunist chances you may have (perhaps you're white?) and generally fuck shit up, to boot." They're not wrong.

In comparison, our job is easy: "You have to overthrow the thing... all at once, without hesitation and without remorse."

"Well, that will never happen in America..."

Then you had better bend over, stick your head between your knees and kiss your ass goodbye, because that's all there is. The Consevatives know it, too.

[meganmonkey]

I saw TA's post yesterday evening and was pretty sure he was seeing 'conservative' vs 'radical' in a different light but didn't have time to look back and make sure I was remembering the context.

All this recycling of terms with different meanings in different times or contexts sure gets confusing. :)

I haven't quite finished the article yet, let alone go through it a second time. I may have more to say (or questions to ask) when I get a chance to do so..some things are confusing to me so I may need to dig around for some history as I reread it.

I'd really like to absorb some of the details. I tend to remember my broader understanding and reactions when I read this stuff but I'm so sick of having to look up names and dates over and over because I can't remember the details.

[Political Heretic]

I haven't really decide what, if anything, I want to say about it specifically - plus, the scope is so huge that trying to respond to it is a little overwhelming.

[PinkoCommie]

I haven't the horsepower to do anything more than share the piece myself...


pardon any typos = pda response.

[Kid of the Black Hole]

Harmon has frustrated me in the past, but he largely hits the mark in this article. I think that he is only a little too kind to Keynes even.

Hopefully others will get around to reading this so we can talk some more about it..there is alot of material

[Kid of the Black Hole]

Harmon tells you what Keynes actually proscribes in The General Theory (somewhat against his own judgment and in spite of himself even). Harmon methodically strips away all of the din and stir and reveals the kernel that is left over.

What is that kernel? Drastic Government manipulation/suppresion of interest rates (whence his infamous euthanasia) and direct and total government direction of investment.

Now tell me, PH..does that sound "unrevolutionary" to you? Does that even sound feasible to you without some kind of revolution?

[anaxarchos]

There is quite a bit of fodder for you. Harman does an excellent job of returning numerous marginal utility types and others back to the first 90 pages of Capital. It is not always clear where people like Marshall are coming from. In fact, they are merely "reconciling" exchange value with use value. Nothing else is really possible. Either it must be reconciled or the whole "thesis" is ejected into the air no matter how many times one repeats that the "natural basis of prices" is irrelevent.

When I was in school, Ricardo was buried for the second time. Joan Robinson had led the first raising from the dead because she was smarter than Keynes about real life. She was helped by people like Piero Sraffa who had been Marxists once, stopped, but remembered the centrality of LTV. By the 1950s, Ricardo was dead again... only to have the old manuscripts reborn in the Cambridge debate of the 1960s. The debate was "declared" in favor of the neoclassicals but the silliness of the Samuelson "victory" was what led to the third revival with people like Krugman. In many ways, it is just ridiculous. They can't live with Ricardo, and they can't live without him... and the smarter ones know that if Ricardo is seated at the table, the Old Man will soon be knocking on the door.

Everything else follows from the first 90 pages of Capital.

[anaxarchos]

Not a single example would remain the same today.. but not a single retrospective judgement would be changed. They would all be strenthened. This piece is required reading.

[anaxarchos]

Somewhat remiscent of the Silicon valley "new ideas" gurus like Eric Schmidt. Once such geniuses tell the truth, everyone will line up to do as they say... for how can people miss the truthiness of it all?

"We will eliminate half of Capitalism so that the other half can live..."

[Political Heretic]

:)

[Kid of the Black Hole]

I know its like asking How does Santa's magic sleigh fly? but about Marginalism. Harmon placed the idea of diminishing returns -- ie that the NEXT product produced always carries greater and greater disutility than the last -- as the rationalization for supply and demand curves being complements of each other and having a unique intersection

I understand the theory and the "logic" but was not aware this was such a fundamental proposition within Marginalism. I know it is supposed to be because the utility of one thing wanes as you reach a (near) saturation which de facto raises the utility of everything else. But that is from the consumers standpoint not that of industry.

So maybe I don't understand it at all, I don't know.

Also, I thought that at some points he should have been a little more concerned with hand-holding when providing "lay" explanations. For instance, why can more output be produced and clear only if wages go down in Marginalist theory? I get that its because they say all wealth is distributed either as profits or wages and greater output is driven by greater investment is driven by greater profits which comes at the expense of wages.

But still, on the surface that is a real headscratcher -- you sell more shit by paying people less money to buy that shit?..and actually, Harmon doesn't take a moment in that section to remind us that it is debunked nonsense in the first place.

Also, I assume that when you said earlier that Harmon focuses on "archaic" (I forget the word you used) issues, you mean his contrast of savings vs investment rates. I just took that as simply more of a period history lesson.

I am re-reading this piece because while the scope of it "feels" vast, I think Harmon is only working one or two themes and he is exceptional at connecting the dots but without explicitly saying: I have connected these dots.

[anaxarchos]

Your "How does Santa's magic sleigh fly?" question is the correct one. There is no such thing as "Marginalism", per se. There is an assumption that it must exist (for explicitly political reasons - read Bentham/Mill). Within that "broadly shared assumption, there is no uniformity whatever. Jevons is so thin that utility comes down to scarcity which brings you right back to LTV. Walras/Pareto use the actual movement of prices to quantify MU post-festum, and then use that as the basis of simulation (with the inevitable criticism that all they have done is to demonstrate the historical movement of prices without regard to MU - i.e. without any understanding of the continuous changes in the economy over time). The "Psychological" guys (i.e. "Austrians", i.e. Libertarians) reject such a possibility out of hand while embracing Walras (how?), with Mises essentially insisting that utility is unquantifiable (and thus is an article of "faith").

Each argument, then, is specific to the theorist: "We all know that Santa's sleigh flies, so one way that could happen is if Santa had a an under-carriage of farting gnats and..." You have to know Harman's specific reference to explore the question in detail but the generic answer is that price of labor is also subject to the same MU (because each seller is also a buyer, yadda, yadda). The capitalist is also a "consumer" - nay, the most important of "consumers".

[Two Americas]

I should probably actually read the full essay before I start commenting.

[Two Americas]

('Radical' Keynesianism) was "stranded, like Keynes, between radical talk on the one hand and recognition of the limits of what is acceptable to those who run the system on the other."

Is that not the same predicament of Democrats, liberals and progressives? Are not people arguing for "recognition of the limits of what is acceptable to those who run the system" to be the overruling and determining factor is all of our political thinking?

We even have self-described socialists who are arguing that we must take into consideration at all times "what is acceptable to those who run the system" and saying that anything outside of the limits of what is acceptable to those who run the system should be seen as unacceptable by us.

Radical talk on the one hand, and staying within the boundaries of what would be acceptable to the rulers on the other - that is what all of the "work within the system" and "practicality" and "being realistic" and "incremental progress" arguments are about.

The question we should be asking people is this - "are you saying that we must stay within the limits of what is acceptable to the those who run the system?"

[PinkoCommie]

As noted here already...

CPUSA Chair Sam Webb is living in denial when he criticized progressives for our failure to, in Webb's words, to "factor in the whole array of forces and conditions that weigh on (Obama's) decision making process and performance before issuing a report card."

There is plenty of evidence indicating the Obama Administration is heading the way of the triangulating Clinton Administration. Progressives have plenty of reason to become alarmed at recent trends in which "Change You Can Believe In" has been replaced by "More of the Same." During this summer we saw the Obama Administration give a wink-and-a-nod to School of Americas graduates to overthrow the democratically elected president of Honduras, increase its sabre rattling against the Bolivarian Revolution, continue the Bush policy of spying on peace groups, freeze Single Payer advocates from the national health care debate, surrender on Card Check without firing a shot, and refusing to prosecute the law breakers from the Bush Administration. There are many other examples, such as Obama's refusal to even issue a Stop Loss executive order to prevent the discharge of gay and lesbian servicemembers, and an increase in bellicosity in Latin America, Afghanistan, and Africa.

At what point are we to "fully put the pedal to the metal," using Webb's own verbiage? Should we wait until the Obama Administration puts Ecuador, Venezuela, and Bolivia on the State Department's terrorism list, as Cuba currently is? Shall we await to hear the sound of American bombs exploding over Caracas? Should we bite our collective tongues until the number of casualties in Afghanistan exceed the ones in Iraq?

From 2001 to 2004 we heard and read in the blogs an endless litany of excuses for the Democrats failure to oppose the abuses of power and war crimes of the Bush/Cheney regime. We were constantly lectured that we should "keep the powder dry" until such time as the "wiser" Beltway establishment decided that enough was enough. We know how well that went! There was a word that fully described what the Democrats did in response to the crimes of the Bush Administration: appeasement.

What will be the next criticism that will be hurled in our direction? That American imperialism doesn't exist in the current condition? That we are being alarmist? That we must "make capitalism work for everyone," as Raghuram Rajan and Luigi Zingales first proposed in 2004? Rajan and Zingales proposal included curbing the powers of domestic lobbies (environmentalists and unions), opening borders to unrestricted flow of goods and capital (let the transnationals pillage to their hearts contend), transferring assets to "efficient" owners (more privatization), and creating a new safety net (private social security accounts). Sounds familiar? - IndianaGreen
http://www.progressiveindependent.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=127&topic_id=6171&mesg_id=6182

[Two Americas]

It would not be such a problem if people were honest and would preface all of their political remarks with "given that we can only consider ideas that will please and be acceptable to the wealthy and powerful few..." But then all of the arguments against the Left would collapse, wouldn't they?

It is as though a criminal gang were terrorizing a town, and we had a group of people who - while they cannot refute the evidence that the criminal gang is the source of the various problems in the town - stubbornly insists that any solution we propose meet with the approval of the gangsters themselves, and then get very angry when that contradiction is pointed out.

[meganmonkey]

"We even have self-described socialists who are arguing that we must take into consideration at all times "what is acceptable to those who run the system" and saying that anything outside of the limits of what is acceptable to those who run the system should be seen as unacceptable by us."


Indeed, I wasted much of my lunch hour skimming [link:www.bestcyrano.org/filesdepot/?p=1432:|this horribly wishy washy article by self-proclaimed socialist Barbara Epstein] who suggests:


2) Left organizations should uphold a set of principles that might be described as socialist-humanist (with the meaning of “humanism” expanded to include other living creatures and the environment). We should avoid focusing on the socialist component of this diad in a way that would narrow or marginalize the left.

3) We should judge our political positions against our core principles: social equality, substantive, participatory democracy, anti-militarism, human and animal rights, environmental balance and sustainability. We should reject positions that conflict with these principles, or with evidence, logic and common sense. Any position that would be laughed at by anyone other than a confirmed leftist should at least be reconsidered.

:wtf: :wtf: :wtf:

That IS what so many are saying, Mike, and it's so ridiculous. How the fuck can you challenge the status quo without...uh...challenging the status quo? It's the weakest shit.

If there IS a left of any kind right now it's too busy eating it's own ass*** to get anything done.

***I don't know what that means either. Sorry :)

[Two Americas]

We have to wade through so much bullshit, so much drama.

Ironically, it is the progressives and liberals who are marginalized and narrowed and can get little or no traction with the general public, because in order to both pose as "change agents" and insist on working within the bounds of advocating only that which is acceptable to the people running the system - and then disguising that and hiding it - requires some mighty convoluted, almost incomprehensible "logic" and rhetoric.

It is easy to see now that this crap - "our core principles: social equality, substantive, participatory democracy, anti-militarism, human and animal rights, environmental balance and sustainability" - serves merely as a distraction. "Don't look at our bizarre logic and our ineffectiveness and complete disconnection from the general public and from reality - remember 'our core principles!'"

From there, people are led by the nose like this - "don't YOU support social equality, substantive, participatory democracy, anti-militarism, human and animal rights, environmental balance and sustainability? All of the good caring people do, you know. What kind of person are you that you would argue with us - the good people who are committed to those core values?? Some of us are realistic and practical and are doing what we can to advance those core principles, within the system. You can stand outside and whine and pout and scream if you want to, but is that really making anything any better?"

[Two Americas]

"It is an amazing commentary on the remoteness of most academic economics from any contact with reality that the 'new classicals' could maintain intellectual credibility when they denied the instability and irrationality of the laissez faire economy in a period which saw three major international recessions. But they had one very important asset on their side: their ideas were very comforting to the ruling class and its placemen and women holding positions of influence in the media and the universities."

[BitterLittleFlower]

by anyone other than a confirmed leftist should at least be reconsidered."

this line alone is so ludicrous I'm incredulous...how someone could seriously write that as a criteria for consideration is...I'm nonplussed...:wtf: is right.

[Dhalgren]

I can hardly speak with my University "friends". They get all nervous and conspiratorial and lower their voices and almost giggle with the bravery they show at sitting next to someone who talks like I do! This Professor of rhetoric and communications I know told me one day that he had never actually read Marx, but he couldn't agree with his basic ideas. I asked him how he could really have any opinion of Marx's ideas if he had never read him. He looked at me like I had something growing out of my forehead. American Universities are what they are paid to be: training grounds for Empire and almost nothing else...


I am only halfway through the article, so I have more to read before commenting directly, but I think the thing (so far) that is so amazing to me is that Keynesian Economics is so threadbare. The way that so much of it seems to be so "off-the-cuff" and so patch-worked. All of these "economists" just pay lip service to the various offshoots of this thing apparently because they don't know what else to do! And someone was worried about "leftists" getting laughed at?! Ha!

Anyway, back to the read...

[Kid of the Black Hole]

reading Marx and writing books about how they can't agree with his basic ideas. Or, there were anyway. I've been combing the public library and there is a copious amount of material all falling under that same umbrella from the 60s and 70s.

Its absurd -- 10 chapters of carefully developed explanations of Marxian thought..followed by one vicious chapter of full bore assault with little or no regard to anything but pressing the offensive. Factual accuracy and objectivity are the first to go. The tone shifts to something akin to what you find on the internet talking about the NWO.

There was definitely a cottage industry for that crap. (Now it appears to mainly be confined to internet crackpots)

[blindpig]

I asked for Kapital and was pointed to a a section where I guess the books were arranged by 'political philosophy'. Other than several copies of Kapital everything else grouped there was anti-communist, all 50's to early seventies vintage and mostly pretty lurid.

What, no Lenin?

[Dhalgren]

"Both <Marx and Keynes> had implied that capitalism as we know it is no longer an advancing system with a great future". This based on Keynes' "declining marginal efficiency of capital" and Marx's theory of "the tendency of the rate of profit to decline" - which, evidently, is essentially the same thing? So the Owners have been riding this dead horse for generations, knowing it was a dead-end, just to squeeze the last few drops of blood from the corpse of the working class - no real attempts at any kind of transition to something manageable - just drain the body dry and disappear into the night...


This article is pretty good stuff - a lot of it over my head, but still, some pretty good stuff...

[meganmonkey]

I've read it all the way through once, plan to again. I don't have much of a background in econ, so some of it is over my head, but I do have some background in philosophy so I can fake it ;)

Actually, some of the stuff in this article (esp re: Hayek) was pushed on me in my undergrad years by a Social Theory prof. Even then I could see the huge assumptions this stuff is based on and how they were never addressed, how removed it all was from reality. The first time I was called a Socialist was in that class - I dared ask what was meant by 'progress', why it was assumed to be good, and why it was assumed to be infinite, and he asked me my major (soc/anthro) and told me I was a socialist and I would never understand this.

It's really interesting to me to revisit it 15 years later and see its actual significance in the real world - I didn't understand the influence it had.

btw: I did end up getting an 'A' in the class, The prof was so used to econ majors who memorized things and never asked questions - even though he and I disagreed constantly we developed a good rapport for debate and he was happy to meet a student who actually thought about stuff, even though I was 'wrong'. There were only 4 students in the class and the rest of them were quiet..my final paper was some convoluted attempt to use Hayek and D'Souza's arguments to defend affirmative action, LOL. I think I still have a copy of that.

[Two Americas]

So the purpose of the class is not to actually teach people anything about economics. The purpose is to convince people that economics is really difficult to understand and that socialism is bad.

That should help people with the article, which wades through all of the smoke screen the apologists for capitalism - which is actually obeisance to the powerful - throw at us. Keynes and others are convoluted and difficult not because the subject of economics is difficult, but rather because that is required to get out of the corners they paint themselves into and because it is useful to the rulers if the entire subject becomes incomprehensible.

So, you were called a Socialist because you asked what was meant by 'progress' and why it was assumed to be good and infinite. Then you were told that because you were a socialist you would never understand what was being peddled.

Seems to me that the whole field of academics is dominated by people whose mission is to make sure everyone is intimidated by the subject. It isn't the subject that is inherently or exceptionally difficult, it is being made to be.

We are dealing with the equivalent of the flat earth society here. Imagine if you were taking astronomy classes, and the instructor was trying to reconcile the objective evidence about the solar system with a flat earth theory. That would get pretty difficult to understand, too.

[meganmonkey]

of the econ majors. How a wayward soc/anthro major like myself got in there, I don't know. Given my decision-making process during the college years, it's likely because the class was taught after 1pm and it fulfilled requirements for both sociology and philosophy (my 'minor'). I probably never even read the course description. 'Social Theory' sounded good to me.

What I didn't realize until Anax spelled it out for me was that I was a 'victim' of an orchestrated attempt to get these neoclassical ideas into economics courses. From anax's Mr. Anonymous article:


http://socialistindependent.org/anax01.htm
Among the very first "front organizations" of the Volker Fund was the "National Book Foundation". While the Foundation's affiliation to the Volker Fund was not hidden, it was circumspect enough to suggest, even to most "Libertarians", that it was independent. The fund began modestly enough by distributing free copies Eugene Böhm-Bawerk's works to thousands of libraries and universities across the country. As the Volker efforts geared up, the Foundation began to distribute millions of books from dozens of authors, all coming from the Fund's stables. Many educational "incentives" were initiated such as "teach a course on Hayek, get 10 (or 100) textbooks for free"...

Don't remember if this little revelation occurred here or at PopIndy, or if you were part of that particular discussion..

To anyone else reading this - if you haven't read Anaxarchos' article linked above, I highly recommend it, especially if this current thread is interesting to ya...

And to be fair, I questioned my sociology profs just as much as I did the Hayek guy..I remember in an intro to sociology class I asked a question about scabs and wondered why, given everything else I was learning, I was supposed to blame the poor dude who desperately crossed the picket line so he could feed his family...LOL, you can imagine how that went over. Needless to say, he made his case quite successfully, despite the fact that I was a naive 17 year old suburbanite who spent my life in a bubble.

(sorry I'm getting all personal/first-person about this - it's just one of those things that shaped my thinking when I was too young/inexperienced to realize it was happening, and when I look back on it now it's still kind of shocking to me!)

[Two Americas]

We have discussed Mr. Anonymous and the Not-So-Spontaneous Birth of the Libertarian "Movement" quite a bit. I could never understand why it didn't have more impact. Maybe people don't even read it?

[meganmonkey]

so I was able to kick it up rather than figure out how much effort to put into formatting it all pretty. :)

[anaxarchos]

... to the publication of Hayek's Road to Serfdom by Reader's Digest. The Digest ostensibly abridged popular books "for the masses". In this case, Hayek had no readership whatever. The act was a blatant con by the radically right-wing Digest... and it worked.

Hayek's whole shpiel was that Keynesian "reforms" overturned the basis of the Democratic Revolutions and put the history of business on a regressive tack. What then about economic crisis? Hayek thought all that was needed was the political will to "tough it out"... that plus "police measures". This is what really connects these people to Leo Strauss. It is long forgotten that they criticized the Nazis, from the right.

[Kid of the Black Hole]

Bumping because it is easy to forget things once they disappear into the ether.

Lots here to discuss, and we haven't even mined the surface yet

[PinkoCommie]

.

[Political Heretic]

I admit its appealing to what I would want to believe....

...that's what set's alarms off.

Has any criticism or response ever been published? I'd like to read objections to the assertions as well as the assertions themselves.

[Kid of the Black Hole]

What we're talking about isn't "who" people are or what they "believe".

[Dhalgren]

Who someone is or what anyone believes are completely immaterial. Analysis, discussion, evaluations, critiques - these are the tools to use, not branding speakers or delving into their personal belief systems...

[anaxarchos]

There is a large body of academic Marxist political economy and many journals in which such issues were and still are debated, the most well known being Monthly Review. Some of the academics have been or are active, so some of the material is quasi-political, but much of it is similar to any other material in the Social Sciences. Consider Harman's piece above as a survey paper with "strong opinions".

I'm trained in this shit and nothing above is particularly controversial... though it seems to me to be very accurate as such things go.

Political Economy is similar to the other social sciences except that its centrality produces two large wings: an apologist wing whose role is obvious, and a Marxi-Socialist-radical-Keynesian wing which inherited the classical economists (too controversial for everyone else) and was reinforced by the existence of real, live Socialism. There is also a technical wing which conscientiously avoids all such subjects.

You have to read the primary material for yourself... though, you are in luck. People like Joan Robinson are very readable (if often wrong). You should try Walras - what an undecipherable tool.

[Kid of the Black Hole]

I will post something by him sometime. I am pretty sure it could pass as "post-modern art" these days.

[chlamor]

http://fc02.deviantart.net/fs45/f/2009/100/8/b/EAT_THE_RICH_Acrylic_on_Canvas_by_scart.png

[Kid of the Black Hole]

There's something I don't get that might simultaneously illustrate an important point here. Namely, what is the reason/need to discuss/contemplate/master this material.

Take the following standalone excerpt from a professor named Hans Ehrbar (he is at a US university)


Allow me to paraphrase Marx's argument in modern terms so that it is
easier for someone living today to follow Marx's logic.

Marx basically says: today's extremely complex social production
apparatus is regulated by market interactions. On the market, the
mass of all commodities are treated as a one-dimensional quantity,
measured by price. This can only then be a successful way of
governing the economy if the underlying production structure can be
reduced to one dimension as well. This one dimension is labor.

What was said in this last paragraph is not yet different from
Ricardo. But then Marx's own contribution to the labor theory of
value begins. Some of this was implicit in Ricardo, but Marx lays it
out clearly and systematically. Marx says: labor itself is as varied
as the use-values it produces, i.e., labor itself cannot be the
one-dimensional skeleton of production. But all labor processes have
something in common: they are the expenditure of human labor-power.
And labor-power is quite homogeneous. 90 percent of the population
could do 90 percent of all the labors if properly trained. This
application of human labor-power, Marx calls it "abstract labor", is
what gives production its one-dimensional character. Basically,
commodity producers have to make only one production decision: they
have to decide which of the many products their labor enables them to
produce should be produced.

In every society labor is the expenditure of human labor-power. But
if the labor produces commodities, then this labor-power is not
used-up and disappeared at the end of the production process, but
society keeps track of it in the value of the product. I.e., the
abstract labor is invisibly still present. Marx calls it a value
quasi-material (Wertgegenstaendlichkeit), "Gegenstaendlichkeit"
meaning something which has similar properties to an object although
it is not really an object. Society acts as if there was some common
material substance inside the commodities, which manifests itself
in the exchangeability of the commodity (more developed manifestations
are the existence of money, the one commodity which can buy all
others).

Marx says therefore: in dealing with commodities, society acts
as if all commodities were pieces of the same homogeneous substance,
value, although in actuality they are the most diverse use-values.
Their common character of value is only actualized in money --
all commodities can and must be exchanged for money.

Although the value of the commodities is not physical -- it is only a
quasi-material and not a material -- one should not say it is a social
fiction. It has a physical basis because the process which creates
value is a physical process. This is how Marx arrives at what he
calls a pivotal insight in volume 1 of Capital: the observation that
the production process of commodities has a double character. It is
production of use-value but it also accumulates value. Both are
grounded in physical characteristics of the production process: one
in the skills of the laborer (concrete labor) and the other in the fact
that the laborer gets tired while working (abstract labor). Note
therefore: although value itself is not something physical but is a
social relation, the production of value has an indispensable physical
component, namely, it is the expenditure of human labor-power.

All this is not yet dependent on capitalism. It is true, at least as
a tendency, whenever there is commodity production. Carrol said for
instance that medieval craftsmen did not compete with each other.
Their prices and the access to their market was regulated so that all
of them could earn a fair income -- but they were also prevented
through the same regulations from becoming capitalists and turning
their apprentices into wage laborers. The guild system was an
institution which counteracted the tendencies inherent in commodity
production itself. If this is what Carrol means then I agree. But I
would not be surprised if those regulated prices turned out to be
roughly proportional to labor content. I am not a medievalist and
therefore I am pretty much guessing here. If others know more please
speak up.

Throughout antiquity and the middle ages there is also famous prose
and poems decrying the corrosive powers of money, some of it quoted by
Marx in chapter 3 of Capital. Again, a sign that the inherent forces
coming with commodity production were at work but society counteracted
them. Marx says that the production process acquires in fact a double
character as soon as commodities were produced for sale rather than
for use. This is long before capitalism. Money also arose long
before capitalism. There were also capitalists long before
capitalism: but they were usurers and merchant capitalists at the
periphery of the economy. The commodity and capital relation had not
yet conquered the core of the social production process.

Now with capitalism, things are intensified and there is certainly a
qualitative shift. The double character of labor, which in chapter 1
of capital is a necessary implication of commodity production, becomes
in chapter 7 (German chapter 5) the deliberate strategy how to exploit
labor. But money and abstract labor already existed long before
capitalism. Capitalism cannot arise without money, and capitalists
are so eager to buy the commodity labor-power exactly because of its
ability to create value. If you say that only wage-labor creates
value then you are giving the capitalists too much credit: you are
basically saying they are making labor productive by exploiting it.
The causality is actually the reverse: they are exploiting labor
because labor is productive of value.

Lets say for a minute that we can work with the above, regardless of whether it is a perfectly correct elaboration.

Then we come to this



Is all this relevant for today? I would say yes. Just three examples
how all this helps us understand what is happening today:

(1) The material basis of the social relation "value" in the
expenditure of human labor-power means that value cannot be produced
by political power. This is the big dilemma of the United States who
are politically, but no longer economically, the dominant power.
Eventually the US must fail economically, but like a cornered tiger
this is no ground for celebration but it makes the US especially
dangerous.

(2) Nowadays it is no longer true enough that production is
one-dimensional. Labor has become so productive that it has
eliminated itself as the most important factor of production. The
binding constraint is no longer labor but the binding constraint are
the earth's material resources, especially its limited ability to
absorb CO2. A simple extension of Marx's theory says that a
one-dimensional market system is structurally unable to do the right
thing about the environment because the economy is no longer
one-dimensional. The failure of the capitalist system to do respond
appropriately to the environmental crisis seems to confirm this
Marxian insight.

(3) It has been said that everything BP does regarding the oil spill
has two different, often conflicting, goals: (a) stop the spill and
save the environment and (b) diminish BP's financial
losses/responsibility. To a Marxist this is nothing new. This is
simply the double character of the capitalist production process.
It happens in all capitalist production, but with the oil spill
it is perhaps better visible.

All of this exceprt is pure drivel and/or reflects someone eyeballing things and backing it up with the seamy underbelly of "theory" (the type of theory that chiefly begs every question)

So how does this work? Why would anyone go through all of the trouble -- even someone as pedantic as Hans here -- just to use it as a prop for their own pet theories and inaneities?

I think it is also a caution, because its an easy trap to fall into for everyone, including us.

[anaxarchos]

A workable understanding of Marxist theory is combined with the most cockamamie ideas which shouldn't be able to co-exist in the same head. Got no idea...

Maybe it is like a prison guard who has one set of behaviors on the job, but tries not to bring them home with him at night.

[Kid of the Black Hole]

but I was half making a comment and half just wanting to bump this thread truthfully.
I've resigned myself on the whole issue of wildly inconsistent ideas habitating in the same brain lol

[PinkoCommie]

That's probly because "What's controversial?" seemed much more inadequate then than it does to me now.

I would like to know more about JB Say and the details of his time and postulate.

[Kid of the Black Hole]

from Theories of Surplus Value?

I kind of was going along with that link -- his basically correct summary of Say's idea that "supply creates its own demand" and so on -- but he's crazy if he thinks Marx was a "mercantilist".

Say's idea is that the total supply of goods is exchangeable for itself so if you have more production you will also have automatically the ability to absorb that production.

[PinkoCommie]

And savings connote a social will to invest while spending connote a social will for more use values.

It seems to me here that there has to be a weakness that, somehow, is related to the dual character of value. Just can't quite put it all together...

I say this because

1) Unlike the legions of asshole, Keynes included in no small measure, that followed I have no knowledge leading me to believe Say had or even would have had in the early 19th century a left-right axe to grind

2) In the absence of such and axe and the presence of plain, real world experience one knows reflexively Say is wrong, every bit as reflexively as the marginalists are wrong that profit falls with increased productivity.

3) It seems to me that what what Keynes answers with is not much less smelly BS, marginal efficiency of capital, than Say's BS.

I just have to wonder if Say had thought about the difference between concrete and abstract labor and the difference between exchange value and use value, what would he have some up with? Keynes answer's Say's position - which really talks about individual actors even as it aspire and fails to traffic in social reality - with a genuinely social answer: "But JB, individuals save for myriad reasons and to varying degrees. You cannot merely concoct of those actions some socially monolithic impetus to invest. It's Just Not So."

So anyway, I'll reiterate the above. I don't know what I am driving at, but I am struck curious somehow. I can say in revisiting this that I am much more able to process the information inside and am, maybe for the first time, able to marvel at the whole cloth that is marginal utility. Wow. Was the Flea just Making Shit Up? Certainly seems so, and yet it is also hard to believe that it would be so purposeful. Merely a useful idiot who got discovered and promoted? I guess that has to be a more accurate characterization.

This excerpt overlaps some with first part of the OP but should be taken in full here I think. It's this issue of Say v. Keynes in the larger context and against the background of the two fold nature of labor and the two fold nature of value that I post this excerpt, admiringly called - from Say to Shining Say - :


Ricardo left succeeding bourgeois economists with two major problems. One was theoretical: to explain how profits could be averaged out between industries which employed the same amount of capital but different amounts of labour. The other was ideological: how to provide some account, other than the robbery of one class by another, to justify the existence of profit at all. Otherwise, they would not be able to prevent radical critics of existing society from turning Ricardo's system into an attack not just on landowners but on capitalism as a whole.

For half a century bourgeois economists floundered as they tried to deal with both problems. As Marx pointed out, they alternated between a scholasticism which consisted in merely repeating abstract expressions from Ricardo, without showing how they related to concrete reality, and abandoning Ricardo's insights so as to apologise for profit. In either case, they abandoned the scientific approach to be found in Smith and Ricardo, which at least attempted to cut through superficial appearances to find underlying causes, in favour of a shallow 'vulgar economics'.

The marginalists took this process a stage further. They proclaimed they could cut through all the problems in Ricardo's system by dropping the very idea of an objective measure of value as mistaken.

But they did not reject everything said by Smith and Ricardo. They enthusiastically embraced those of their contentions which seemed to justify the untrammelled play of market forces*for instance Adam Smith's 'hidden hand' view that the best way to serve the general good was to allow free competition between producers whose only concern was with their individual interests, and Ricardo's 'theory of comparative advantage' defence of free trade. At the same time, they put at the centre of their system a 'law' promulgated by the French economist Jean-Baptiste Say and accepted by Ricardo. This held that generalised crises of overproduction were impossible because 'supply created its own demand'. The extra value of the goods produced by any firm over and above material costs, Say said, was equal to the wages paid to its workers plus the profit paid to the capitalist. So for the economy as a whole, the total amount in people's pockets from wages and profits must be exactly the same as the amount needed to buy all goods that had been produced.

Slumps, then, were logically impossible unless for some reason, a group of people were refusing to sell the goods at their disposal or to spend the money in their pockets. John Stuart Mill had expressed the prevailing view some 20 years before the marginalists developed their own ideas:

Each person's means for paying for the production of other people consists in those [commodities] that he himself possesses. All sellers are inevitably by the meaning of the word buyers... A general over-supply...of all commodities above the demand is...an impossibility... People must spend their...savings...productively; that is, in employing labour.

The marginalists were only too happy to incorporate this view as a central feature of their own system. Where they broke with the Smith-Ricardo tradition was over what the main concern of economics should be. What mattered to them was not the creation of wealth and its distribution between classes, but rather showing that the fixing of prices through the market, without conscious human intervention, automatically led to the most efficient way of running an economy. And so they abandoned the old view of value, with its concentration on the objective necessity of labour for production.

Value became for them not an objective measure at all, but rather a subjective estimation by individuals of the 'utility' they got from every extra amount ('marginal increment') of any commodity. Curves could be drawn showing how people compared the 'marginal utility' of one commodity with another, and these would indicate the relative amounts they would be prepared to pay for each commodity if they were allowed a free choice in an unfettered market.

Curves could also be drawn showing the cost of producing goods. The marginalist economists measured this in two different ways. Some, like Jevons and Marshall, started from the assumption that production involved people in various sorts of hardship, of negative utility or 'disutility'. Workers had to toil, whereas most would have been happier doing nothing. And investors had to 'sacrifice' present consumption of some wealth so that it could be used to produce more wealth in future. Wages and profits 'rewarded' the 'disutility' each had incurred, and, of course, were equally justified. Other marginalists like Boehm Bawerk, recognising the difficulty of crudely equating the hardship of labour with the 'sacrifice' of saving, adopted a different approach. They claimed the costs of production depended on the 'utility' of the various goods used in production (the consumption goods of the workers plus the materials, machines etc) with an addition to take account of the increase in output which occurred when goods were used as means of production over time and not consumed immediately. This extra element provided the basis for payment of interest on capital.

All the marginalists insisted that labour and capital were alike 'factors of production' and that each received a 'reward' (wages or profits) for increasing total 'utility'. The costs of supplying extra amounts ('marginal increments') of each good could be plotted on a 'demand curve'. And the point where such a demand curve crossed a supply curve was the point at which the 'marginal cost' of producing a good corresponded with the 'marginal utility' it gave to someone who bought it. At that point, the price for the goods would ensure that the needs of the consumer were being satisfied in the most efficient way by the producer.

There was only one 'equilibrium' point, all the marginalists insisted, at which this could happen. This was because, they argued, demand and supply curves would always slope in different directions and cross each other only once. On the demand side, people's desires for any particular good tended to get the less the more of it they had, and so the 'demand' for it would decline the more there was available. On the supply side, by contrast, they claimed, applying to industry a 'law of diminishing returns' established by Ricardo for agriculture, the cost of producing goods increased the more that were turned out. The one million and first widget or screw or motor car or hamburger would always cost more to produce than the one millionth. Because of this supply costs would always rise with output, while the price people were prepared to pay for something would fall the more of it was available.

What is more, they claimed, supply and demand curves existed not just for each good, but for the whole pool of goods produced in any economy. Provided they were free to spend their money as they liked, buying whatever they wanted within their means, consumers would choose the range that gave them the greatest utility at a particular set of prices. And providing they were free to produce whatever they wanted and to charge whatever price they could get for it, producers would adapt their output to satisfy these utilities at cost to themselves* that is, with the most economical combinations of land, labour and capital.

The whole economy, according to this picture, is like a street market where the buyer of fruit and vegetables calculates what combination of apples, tomatoes, potatoes, etc gives them the best value for the money they have got in their pockets, while the stallholders calculate the best price they can get for each of their goods. As each adjusts their calculations to the others', the whole product gets sold. And since the seller is, in turn, the buyer from the wholesale market, and the wholesalers in turn are the buyers from the growers, in this way a whole network of prices is set up which ensures that what is produced is exactly what people want.

So if you lumped together all the supply and all the demand curves for society as a whole, you could show that the range and number of goods produced in the whole economy had to coincide with what people were prepared to buy. This the French economist Walras claimed to do, with hundreds of pages of equations and graphs.

Problems could only arise if some people insisted on trying to get more for their goods than other people were prepared to pay*, that is, than the 'marginal utility' of those goods. Then the equations would not balance, markets would not 'clear' and there would be stocks of unsold goods. This, however, was the fault of the sellers of the goods for trying to evade charging the 'natural' price, and they would soon be brought to their senses by the pressures of the market providing there was no impediment to its free operations* that is, providing sellers were free to compete with each other and buyers free to shop where they wanted.

Labour, from this standpoint, was no different to any other good. If workers demanded wages greater than the extra utility created by their labour, then no one would employ them and unemployment would exist. But if they were prepared to lower the wages for which they would work, then supply and demand would once more coincide and full employment would return. All that was necessary for Say's law to operate was that there should be no 'artificial' inducement against them accepting lower wages (pressure from the unions, or state benefits enabling workers to survive without work). The argument still underlies the contention that the introduction of a minimum wage would destroy jobs.

Marginal problems

The development of these 'neo-classical' ideas took place over 40 or 50 years, and there were differences of interpretation between the various marginalist economists. So, for instance, many gave in to the obvious criticism that there is no way of comparing the amount of 'utility' one person gets from one good as against the 'utility' another person gets from another good and that, therefore, the whole idea of 'utility curves' for society as a whole is nonsense. They responded by replacing the term 'utility' by 'ophelimity' or even by dropping any notion of value altogether *although 'marginal utility' continues to be taught in school and college textbooks to this day as the 'modern' answer to the labour theory of value.

The most prestigious of the English marginalists, Marshall, accepted in his major work, The Principles of Economics, that in the real world the economy could deviate in many of these ways from the marginalist model. He admitted that the notion that a multi-millionaire living in luxury received profits as payment for 'abstemiousness' was rather far fetched, and preferred to refer to 'waiting' rather than 'abstemiousness'. He devoted several passages and appendices to what happened if there were not diminishing returns. Consequently supply and demand curves intersected differently than expected or even crossed each other at more than one point* something which threatened to undermine the whole notion of a single stable equilibrium point. Elsewhere he suggested there might occasionally be merit in using a labour theory of value: 'the real value of money is better measured for some purposes in labour rather than in commodities', although he hastened to add, 'This difficulty will not affect our work in the present volume...'

Marshall admitted, in passing, to an enormous gap in his theory* that it had nothing to say about what happened to an economy as it changed through time. The marginalist account of prices was in terms of what happened when a given level of demand, based upon a certain set of consumer choices, encountered a given pattern of supply, based on an existing set of techniques and existing land, labour and capital resources. It paid no heed to the reality that capital was continually accumulating and the techniques of production were continually developing, so transforming both the pattern of supply and the pattern of demand for those products that served as inputs to production. 'Time', Marshall wrote, is 'the source of many of the greatest difficulties in economics', and went on to admit that the process of accumulation caused enormous problems for the marginalists:

Changes in the volume of production, in its methods, and its costs are ever mutually modifying one another... In this world, therefore, every plain and simple doctrine as to the link between cost of production, demand and value is necessarily false... A man is likely to be a better economist if he trusts his common sense and practical instincts rather than if he professes and studies the theory of value and is resolved to find it easy.

Walras too recognised momentarily that 'production requires a certain lapse of time.' But he simply shrugged the problem off. 'We shall solve the...difficulty purely and simply by ignoring the time element at this point'.1

He went on to argue that prices would remain unchanged through time, as if the transformation of the whole productive apparatus brought about by accumulation would not also mean a transformation of the structure of supply and demand:

There may be a small element of uncertainty which is due solely to the difficulty of foreseeing possible changes in the data of the problem. If, however, we suppose these data constant for a given period of time and if we suppose the prices of goods and services and also the dates of their purchase and sale to be known for the whole period, there will be no occasion for uncertainty.

In other words, his whole analysis of the capitalist economy was posited on the assumption that those most characteristic features of that economy* - accumulation, technical change and a consequent reduction of production costs* - do not occur!

Finally, the marginalists had to accept that in practice the economy experienced a 'trade cycle' or 'business cycle' of booms and recessions, in which for some reason supply and demand did not always balance as their theory claimed. Their reaction was to blame these things on external factors that somehow led to temporary distortions in a fundamentally healthy system. So Jevons wrote that the business cycle was a result of sun spots which, he claimed, speeded up and slowed down the trade winds, while Walras saw crises as disturbances caused by the failure of prices to respond to supply and demand, comparable in effect to passing storms on a shallow lake. They did not allow what they saw as short term aberrations to undermine their faith in an unchallengeable system of laws which laid down how any efficient economy must operate.

The logic of marginalism was that the existing economic system was the best in the best of all possible worlds, providing the 'optimal' conditions for production and laying down rules for any situation in which 'scarce resources' had to be allocated between 'competing ends'. It was for people like the English establishment economist, Robbins, or the Austrian, von Mises, nothing less than an expression in economic terms of democracy: by freely spending their money as they wanted, consumers were 'voting' through the price mechanisms for those items they wanted to be produced. This could even justify existing inequalities in wealth and incomes:

That the consumption of the rich weighs more heavily in the balance than the consumption of the poor is in itself an 'election result', since in a capitalist society wealth can be acquired and maintained only by a response corresponding to the consumers' requirements. Thus the wealth of successful businessmen is always the result of a consumers' plebiscite.

Not all the marginalists were as reactionary as this. Bernard Shaw tried to base arguments for Fabian socialism on Jevons's version of marginalism. And some academic marginalists claimed there had to be a socialist redistribution of wealth and income for the neo-classical model to find full expression in reality.

But the left wing marginalists believed as much as the right wing ones that their economic theory had proved the efficacy of the market. They all held that they had developed an unchallengeable system of economic laws and had proved that any interference with the workings of the market would do more harm than good. Even if state intervention was regarded as necessary, it had to be in accordance with these 'laws', rather than aimed at overriding them.

[b]Keynes and Say's law

Keynes's General Theory contains many attacks on certain of the contentions of neo-classical economists. But it was far from being an attack on the whole theory. Keynes had studied under Marshall and believed for many years that the 'free' market would work well were it not for the blundering of politicians. In the mid-1920s he provided his Cambridge students with 'rosy prophecies of continually increasing capitalist prosperity', even if he was strongly critical of particular government policies. He assured people, 'There will be no further crash in our lifetime'. Even after the experience of the great slump at the beginning of the 1930s he continued to take the main marginalist concepts for granted.

But he did now challenge two of the economic orthodoxy's central contentions: *Say's law and the idea that wage cutting was the way to restore full employment.

His attack on Say's law was simple and direct. The law, as we saw above, states that the wages and profits paid out during the production of goods are equal to the total sum required to buy them, and that therefore they can always be sold.

The argument, Keynes points out, depends on supposing that, whenever someone saves, the labour and commodities they would otherwise have consumed are 'automatically invested in the production of capital wealth'. This might be true in 'some kind of non-exchange Robinson Crusoe economy', where the individuals produce everything they want themselves and where 'saving' can only occur if they devote some of the products of their present activity to the purpose of future production'. But it is certainly not the case in a money economy, where saving can mean simply hoarding money without using it to buy things.

If such saving can occur, then some of the money paid out in wages and profits is not spent on goods, and all the goods produced need not be bought. An overproduction of goods in relation to the market for them can then arise.

Not to see this, Keynes argued, was to be 'deceived by an optical illusion which makes two essentially different activities appear to be the same'. It was to assume that, because investment cannot take place unless some labour and goods are saved rather than immediately consumed, then saving and investment were the same thing. But they were not. They were different activities, often undertaken by different people for different reasons. This could lead people to want to undertake saving on a higher level than they chose to invest.

People save, Keynes argued, for a variety of motives*: because they want to buy things later rather than immediately, because they know they will incur certain costs at some point in the future, because they want to guard themselves against unexpected events, and for speculative reasons. The combination of all these factors determines their 'propensity to save'.

By contrast, he insisted, the level of investment depends on the profits businessmen believe they will make in future (what he refers to as 'the marginal efficiency of capital'). If these expected future profits are low* and he expected them to decline as capitalism got older* then investment will not take place on any scale, regardless of how high savings are. And if this happens, the total output of the economy cannot be sold. 'Overproduction', the thing ruled impossible by Say's law, will occur.

An initial excess of supply over demand would leave firms with goods they could not sell. They would react by reducing output (or going bust) and paying out less in wages and profits. Only when this process had reduced saving until it was at the same level as investment would an 'equilibrium' be reached at which the total expenditure would provide a market for all the goods produced.

Keynes, in effect, turned the old orthodoxy about supply and demand on its head. It had been assumed that, if saving increased, investment would increase to create full employment and full capacity operation of industry. He insisted that, if investment was not as high as saving, the economy would contract until saving fell to the same low level:

Thus given the propensity to consume and the rate of new investment, there will be only one level of employment consistent with equilibrium... But there is no reason in general for expecting it to equal full employment.

Indeed, as he wrote shortly before the appearance of The General Theory, 'unemployment is increased by whatever figure is necessary to impoverish the community so as to reduce the amount people desire to save to equality with the amount they are willing to invest'.

[marat]

A kick for this...

[Kid of the Black Hole]

A kick for this...

I haven't read through this in a while, but I know I've read it at least twice and one of those times I took notes. Its long, but worth it.

[anaxarchos]

I haven't read through this in a while, but I know I've read it at least twice and one of those times I took notes. Its long, but worth it.

This thread is jam-packed. There is a ton of stuff in here. Perhaps we should ship it off to the reference forum?

[Kid of the Black Hole]

This thread is jam-packed. There is a ton of stuff in here. Perhaps we should ship it off to the reference forum?

Well we could but I would be game to renew a discusison on some of this stuff..if there is any interest. If not, then Reference Forum, yes.

[PinkoCommie]

The return of Keynes?

By PETRINO DiLEO (ISR, Feb. 2009)

“Remember Friday March 14, 2008: it was the day the dream of global free-market capitalism died.”
—Martin Wolf

THE FIRST few decades of the post–Second World War era were a period of unprecedented economic boom for world capitalism. From the late 1940s through the early 1970s, the global economy expanded at a rate of 4 percent per year while the gross capital stock grew at 3.2 percent per year. During that time, the theories of British economist John Maynard Keynes—of deficit-based, government stimulus spending and strong regulation of markets—dominated economic policy and thought. Keynesianism became connected in popular consciousness with the idea that state intervention—including government social programs, infrastructural spending, and even in some cases, partial state ownership—was necessary to ward off the system’s tendency toward deep economic disturbances, such as the Great Depression of the 1930s.

However, by the 1970s, the long boom was coming to an end. In 1965, persistent inflation set in among the advanced capitalist nations. At the same time, U.S. profit rates began to fall precipitously as the U.S.—burdened by high military spending and aging capital stock—became less competitive on the world market against the freshly rebuilt and retooled economic powers in Europe and Japan. This produced a period of low growth and high inflation—dubbed “stagflation.” For this, Keynesian theory—which in itself calls for inflationary policies during times of recession—had no answer. Further encouraging inflation during an already inflationary period was not an option. This left economic policy makers at a loss and helped open the door for a radical change in approach.

Out of the crisis emerged a hitherto obscure group of academics centered around the Austrian economist Friedrich Von Hayek, a group that included Ludwig Von Mises and Milton Friedman, who had been arguing since the 1940s against state intervention in the economy, against unions, and against the welfare state.

Milton Friedman and his acolytes, many trained at the University of Chicago, along with influential think tanks like the Cato Institute, provided the ideological justification for an all-out attack on working-class wages and standards of living, coupled with proposals to deregulate the economy, privatize public enterprises, and dismantle the social safety net. These conservatives, later dubbed “neoliberals,” argued that the best way to stimulate demand was by steering money directly to capitalists by cutting wages and taxes. This was known as “supply-side” economics, as opposed to the “demand”-oriented policies of Keynesianism. This was the dominant economic theory for the past thirty years.

The neoliberal period witnessed three waves of significant expansion in which the U.S. was able to reassert its dominance in the world market—though the U.S. was never to re-create the robust growth rates of the postwar boom. However, the policy of rampant deregulation that has been the hallmark of this era led to severe economic crisis, starting with the Asian crisis in 1998, spreading to Latin America, and finally producing a sharp recession in the U.S. in 2001 with the collapse of the dot-com bubble. The recovery that followed, based on a grossly inflated housing bubble backed by subprime mortgages, has led to a massive destabilization of the financial system, which remains crippled by the credit crunch that initially emerged in 2007, and that continues to rip through the U.S. and world economy with no end in sight.

Rather than “letting the market work,” the government has been increasingly aggressive in trying to stabilize the financial system. The state and central banks in the U.S. and Europe also have intervened heavily in trying to stabilize the financial system—including partial and temporary nationalizations—violating a key precept of neoliberalism that state intervention is harmful to the economy. Many trillions of dollars have already been spent by states to calm the financial panic. The crisis, itself a product of neoliberal deregulation, has forced a break from the policies and ideology of the past three decades.

These failures of the free market have raised the question of what economic paradigm will replace neoliberalism. In recent months, a flurry of articles and books have appeared making the case for a return to Keynesian measures. Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, a blistering indictment of neoliberalism, suggests Keynesianism was both less brutal and provided more robust economic growth. She writes of “Keynesian attempts to pool collective wealth and to build more just societies.” Meanwhile, left-wing economic journal Dollars & Sense recently argued for the re-creation of the New Deal–era Works Progress Administration. The Nation, under a headline, “Toward a new New Deal,” raised that prospect with a dozen people, including Howard Zinn, Andy Stern and Jesse Jackson.

In the mainstream, Paul Krugman, a prominent New York Times columnist and the 2008 Nobel Prize winner in economics, consistently argues for Keynesian solutions to the current economic problems. One of his recent articles, written not long after Barack Obama’s election as forty-fourth president, entitled “Franklin Delano Obama,” argues that this moment provides an opportunity for Obama to engage in the kind of government stimulus and regulation used in the 1930s to attempt to stabilize capitalism. Some magazines have taken that one step further, inserting Obama’s face into iconic images of FDR. Even uber-capitalists Bill Gates and George Soros have come out recently arguing for a kinder, gentler capitalism by limiting wealth disparities and for more government oversight of the economy and the financial system.

Economists are calling this the worst crisis since the 1930s. It is only natural then, that the economist most associated with attempting to devise mechanisms to alleviate that crisis and prevent more from arising should now be on so many people’s lips. All this raises some important questions. One, what exactly is Keynesianism? Secondly, was Keynesianism ultimately responsible for the long postwar economic boom? Lastly, would a return to Keynesianism be possible?

The rise of Keynesianism

Before the advent of neoliberal economics, Keynesianism was the dominant ideology taught in economics classes and was the de facto starting point of economic policy after the Second World War. “Thanks to this new economics, it was widely accepted that given an appropriate manipulation of the budgetary aggregates and suitable monetary policies,” to quote one study of Keynesianism from the 1980s, “what Keynes was to term the level of effective demand could be raised to a point where all involuntary unemployment was more or less eliminated.” This was a period in which state intervention in general was seen as normal and necessary to the functioning of capitalism. Indeed, there developed in this period a whole spectrum of acceptable state monopoly capitalist measures, depending on the country, ranging from deficit spending policies to what was called the “mixed economy”—a mix of private and state ownership, and extending all the way to complete state ownership. These policies were adopted in various ways by states regardless of where they fell on the political spectrum.

The roots of Keynesianism lie in the Great Depression of the 1930s. That deep crisis of capitalism—marked by a collapse of production and world trade and high rates of unemployment throughout the advanced capitalist countries—gripped the advanced nations for nearly a decade. It contributed to deep social unrest, as there seemed to be no end to the misery of the masses. At the depths of the crisis in the U.S. it is estimated that the unemployment rate reached close to 25 percent.

Prior to the depression, bourgeois economics accepted the theory that all markets are self-regulating and self-correcting. With the rise of the labor movement, mainstream economists came to reject the labor theory of value—accepted by the classical economists such as Ricardo and, to a certain extent, Adam Smith—which posited that value is determined by the labor embodied in commodities. Interpretations of the labor theory of value varied, but it was accepted that value was created in the production process by living labor. However, acceptance of the importance of labor within mainstream thought had the unfortunate effect—from the capitalist point of view—of giving weight to the conception of surplus value as “unpaid labor,” and of the working class as central to the system’s functioning and, ultimately, as the class with the power to overthrow it. Instead, bourgeois economists, whose concern became that of defending the economic order of capitalism, devised alternate explanations that substituted for the labor theory of value with other, more superficial, and therefore less threatening theories.

One of the main tenets of what Marx called the “vulgar economists”—apologists for the system—was Say’s Law (named after the late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century economist J.B. Say), which became the dominant view prior to the 1930s. Say’s Law posited that production generated its own demand. Essentially, the view of economists was that one person’s spending becomes another’s income. This means there is a “circular flow of income and output” through an economy. Overproduction or shortages could therefore only ever be short-term, accidental phenomena. As a result, the state need and should do nothing to try and solve recession, but merely wait for the system to fix itself. This became the prevailing free-market theory accepted by the “neoclassical school.” However, the severity and the seeming intractability of the Great Depression opened the door for a revision in economic thought.

John Maynard Keynes was a British economist who lived from 1883 to 1946. He was a prodigious writer whose most influential work was the General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, published in 1936, although he was well known since at least the 1920s. The book hit the scene at the height of the Great Depression. It raised major arguments against the dominant economic ideology of the time. And its last section is devoted to laying out a series of public policy prescriptions for ending crisis.

From the capitalist perspective, Keynesian theory came along at the perfect time—providing a ruling-class strategy to solve the crisis at a time when millions of people around the globe were drawing revolutionary conclusions. As Marxist economist Paul Mattick wrote:

[T]he great economic and social upheavals of twentieth century capitalism destroyed confidence in laissez-faire’s validity. Marx’s critique of bourgeois society and its economy could no longer be ignored. The overproduction of capital with its declining profitability, lack of investments, overproduction of commodities and growing unemployment, all predicted by Marx, was the undeniable reality and the obvious cause of the political upheavals of the time. To see these events as temporary dislocations that soon would dissolve themselves in an upward turn of capital production did not eliminate the urgent need for state interventions to reduce the depth of the depression and to secure some measure of social stability. Keynes’ theory fitted this situation. It acknowledged Marx’s economic predictions without acknowledging Marx himself, and represented, in its essentials and in bourgeois terms, a kind of weaker repetition of the Marxian critique; and, its purpose was to arrest capitalism’s decline and prevent its possible collapse.

Despite the flaws Keynes saw in the system he still unreservedly favored capitalism and was in support of the “inequality of the distribution of wealth” as the best means for a vast amassing of capital. “The immense accumulations of fixed capital which, to the great benefit of mankind,” he wrote in the Economic Consequences of the Peace, “were built up during the half century before the war, could never have come about in a society where wealth was divided equitably.” Ultimately, Keynes sought not to replace capitalism but to regulate the system’s functioning without sacrificing its fundamental characteristics. Keynes himself was quite conscious of the necessity of both theoretical and practical measures to save capitalism and combat revolutionary ideologies. In a letter to Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, after the adoption of the first New Deal policies, Keynes called Roosevelt “the trustee for those in every country who seek to mend the evils of our condition by reasoned experiment within the framework of the existing social system. If you fail, rational change will be gravely prejudiced throughout the world, leaving orthodoxy and revolution to fight it out.”

Keynes was not the first mainstream critic of free-market capitalist ideology. But his ideas caught fire because they provided a more cogent explanation for the Great Depression than his neoclassical predecessors. At its heart, Keynesianism looks at crises within capitalism as arising from “underconsumption.” That is, the problem is not that of overproduction in terms of what can be sold profitably—but that of consumers, for one reason or another, backing off and not consuming enough to stimulate investment.

Keynes argued that not all savings are automatically converted into spending in a short time span. That serves as a drain on Say’s seemingly perfect cycle. And, in recessionary situations, capitalists may fear investing if they cannot find a profitable outlet. Instead, they hoard it and the rate of savings increases. The lack of investment means layoffs and scaling back in production. This only exacerbates the crisis. Left to its own devices, he argued, capitalism would fall into deep crises repeatedly. The policies he put forth purported to be a way out of the Great Depression through a path of fiscal and monetary policy and aggressive government intervention.

Economic activity according to Keynes is determined by what he called “aggregate demand.” In times of recession and overproduction, for capitalists to hoard savings and push through layoffs and wage cuts was exactly the wrong strategy. In turn, workers, in a suddenly precarious state, also tend to cut back on spending and try to save what they can in the event that they might lose their jobs. The net result of all of this is that consumption of goods throughout society continues to slow down, which only exacerbates the existing crisis of overproduction. That, in turn, can lead to even more hoarding by capitalists in a vicious circle.

The solution was for the government to play an active role in the economy, first by manipulating interest rates to moderate inflation or deflation, and secondly by “priming the pump” by undertaking strategies to increase “effective demand.” In chapter ten of The General Theory, he gives what is now a famous hypothetical case of pump-priming, suggesting that unemployment could be eliminated by the government “filling old bottles with banknotes,” burying them in disused coal mines, and leaving it “to private enterprise…to dig the notes up again…. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing.

As Mattick wrote:

In this view, it is the function of government to secure the existence and welfare of private enterprise. Aside from the overall effect of governmental money and fiscal policies, depressed industries are to be helped along with special credit facilities. Public works are to be constructed with an eye to the needs of private capital—roads for the automobile industry, airports for the aircraft industry, and so forth. Along with preferential treatment for new investments there should also go an increase in the propensity to consume by way of social security legislation as an instrument of economic stability.

Why focus on demand rather than tax cuts or other packages aimed at placing funds directly in the hands of investors? Keynes agreed that increasing the rate of investment could achieve the aim of increasing consumption within society. However, he also saw that as corporations and the wealthy accumulate more wealth, they tend to invest an increasingly smaller portion of their savings. This “liquidity preference,” he argued, was a result of expectations of declining rates of return. Capitalists can be encouraged to invest, but not fully. Overall, “savings will increase faster than investments. As this occurs, aggregate demand declines and the actual level of employment falls short of the available labor supply.” Therefore measures to increase demand were more likely to stimulate investment than measures putting cash directly into investors’ hands.

Keynes was clear that his analysis was aimed at saving capitalism, not undermining it. “Whilst, therefore, the enlargement of the functions of government, involved in the task of adjusting to one another the propensity to consume and the inducement to invest, would seem to a nineteenth-century publicist or to a contemporary American financier to be a terrific encroachment on individualism,” he wrote. “I defend it, on the contrary, both as the only practicable means of avoiding the destruction of existing economic forms in their entirety and as the condition of the successful functioning of individual initiative.”

It wasn’t only his desire to restore the health of capitalism that set Keynes apart from Marx. His theory of crisis was also fundamentally different. Where Marx saw the driving force of capitalism as accumulation for accumulation’s sake—the constant drive toward profit—Keynes continued to assume that “consumption…is the sole end and object of all economic activity.” The lack of “effective demand” in Keynes’ theory of crises is another way of saying that capital is not being invested; it does not, however, explain why. In short, whereas for Marx the possibility of the separation of purchase and sale that makes crisis a possibility is the starting point for understanding capitalist crisis, for Keynes it is the endpoint. Keynes’ theory of crisis—the lack of aggregate demand—is merely a description of the effects of crisis, not an explanation of why crises take place.

Marxist theory roots economic crisis in a crisis of profitability, which is the key factor in determining levels of investment. The unplanned nature of capitalist expansion leads to the development of disproportionalities between various branches of production, overproduction of capital, and the production of too many commodities that can be sold at a profit. The expansion of credit facilitates the expansion of investment and of the market, only to contract it when investment has overshot what the market is capable of absorbing—a reflection of the anarchy of the market. The inability to sell means capitalists cannot turn surplus value they have extracted from workers into profit, which leads to cuts in investments, layoffs, etc. This is one aspect of the system’s cyclical crisis. The incentive to incessantly increase productivity—something that competition compels each capitalist to do—leads to a growing ratio of investment in means of production over labor—that is, more investment in machines, in fixed capital in proportion to the number of workers employed. Since labor—as the source of surplus value—is the root of profits, the relative decline in the labor component of total investment leads to a decline in the rate of profit. Marx called this the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

These factors lead to periods of crisis—recessions or depressions—that are only resolved through the destruction and devaluation of capital and mass unemployment and wage cuts. As Marx writes in Volume Three of Capital:

How is this conflict settled and the conditions restored which correspond to the “sound” operation of capitalist production? The mode of settlement is already indicated in the very emergence of the conflict whose settlement is under discussion. It implies the withdrawal and even the partial destruction of capital amounting to the full value of additional capital DC, or at least a part of it. Although, as the description of this conflict shows, the loss is by no means equally distributed among individual capitals, its distribution being rather decided through a competitive struggle in which the loss is distributed in very different proportions and forms, depending on special advantages or previously captured positions, so that one capital is left unused, another is destroyed, and a third suffers but a relative loss, or is just temporarily depreciated, etc.

The problem with an underconsumptionist theory of crisis is that it cannot explain why crisis would not be permanent under capitalism, which it clearly is not. Underconsumption theory argues that the cause of crisis is that the working class does not consume the full value of its product. Naturally, the working class cannot consume the total product of its labor because, firstly, it does not consume means of production—machinery, raw materials, and physical plant. Secondly, it cannot do so because the basis of capitalist accumulation is the appropriation of unpaid labor. The restricted consumption of the working class is thus a condition of capital accumulation. True, Marx identified one contradiction of capitalism as that between the system’s constant drive for expansion and the “narrow basis on which the conditions of consumption rest.” However, he did not consider this to be the cause of crises:

It is a pure tautology to say that crises are provoked by a lack of effective demand or effective consumption. The capitalist system does not recognize any forms of consumer other than those who can pay, if we exclude the consumption of paupers and swindlers. The fact that commodities are unsaleable means no more than that no effective buyers have been found for them, i.e., no consumers (no matter whether the commodities are ultimately sold to meet the needs of productive or individual consumption). If the attempt is made to give this tautology the semblance of greater profundity, by the statement that the working class receives too small a portion of its own product, and that the evil would be remedied if it received a bigger share, i.e., if its wages rose, we need only note that crises are always prepared by a period in which wages generally rise, and the working class actually does receive a greater share in the part of the annual product destined for consumption. From the standpoint of these advocates of sound and “simple” (!) common sense, such periods should rather avert the crisis.

Engels notes in Anti-Dühring that it is impossible to explain the cause of capitalist crisis by something that predated capitalism by centuries:

The under-consumption of the masses, the restriction of the consumption of the masses to what is necessary for their maintenance and reproduction, is not a new phenomenon. It has existed as long as there have been exploiting and exploited classes. … Therefore, while under-consumption has been a constant feature in history for thousands of years, the general shrinkage of the market which breaks out in crises as the result of a surplus of production is a phenomenon only of the last fifty years…. The under-consumption of the masses is a necessary condition of all forms of society based on exploitation, consequently also of the capitalist form; but it is the capitalist form of production which first gives rise to crises. The under-consumption of the masses is therefore also a prerequisite condition of crises, and plays in them a role which has long been recognised. But it tells us just as little why crises exist today as why they did not exist before.

Keynesianism and the working class

According to neoclassical thought, unemployment was not a fault of the system, but was to be blamed on workers unwilling to accept wage cuts. In fact, neoclassical economists viewed wage cuts as being the solution to unemployment. Neoclassical economics also argued, again because of Say’s Law, there was no such thing as involuntary unemployment. “General unemployment appears when asking too much is a general phenomenon. … [Workers] should learn to submit to declines in money-income without squealing.”

Keynes, however, argued that lowering wages in some instances might reduce effective demand. Cutting wages during a recession or depression would only exacerbate the crisis. Reducing wages could cut demand, meaning producers would have to reduce production. That could mean more unemployment and further worsen a recession.

The appeal for some, then, of Keynesian policy is that it calls for some redistribution of wealth from the top to the bottom, and that he pushes for “full employment.” However, Keynes’ perspective on this was strictly a ruling-class one. He supported not higher wages, but rather “the maintenance of a stable general level of money-wages” in order to maintain “equilibrium.” Keynes also thought it important that wages not become too high. In fact, though Keynes criticized the neoclassical theory of wages, he did not completely reject its premises, writing, for example, that, “A reduction in money-wages is quite capable in certain circumstances of affording a stimulus to output, as the classical theory supposes.”

To that end, Keynes saw that inflation could be a positive tool for capital in that it could bring out reductions in workers’ wages without outright wage cuts. “A movement by employers to revise money-wage bargains downward will be much more strongly resisted than a gradual and automatic lowering of real wages as a result of rising prices,” he advised.

Keynes’ concern that wages not be cut too much did not arise from a position of sympathy with the working class. Instead, it arose entirely from his underconsumptionist framework. In Keynes’ view, the key is for aggregate demand to equal total income and therefore ensure that an economy remains in balance. Therefore full employment should be pursued as a way to help stimulate aggregate demand when necessary. For Keynes, the best course of action is to “promote investments and, at the same time, to promote consumption, not merely to the level which, with the existing propensity to consume, would correspond to the increased investment, but to a higher level still.”

For Keynes, wage reductions should not be viewed as a goal. In fact, governments should put in protections—minimum wage laws, for example—to keep a certain level of equity in the economy. This wasn’t because Keynes believed in equitable division in assets. Instead, he understood that great wealth inequalities could lead to resistance, and he considered it desirable to damp down class struggle.

Fiscal vs. monetary policyhyperinflation -

Keynes viewed interest rates in a novel light as well. He saw interest as the cost of keeping wealth in the form of money. Interest is paid on money that is lent. So if a capitalist wants liquidity—that is, to keep cash on hand—he forfeits the interest he could receive if he had lent that money.

Keynes did share the neoclassical view that capitalists will make decisions on whether to lend or invest based on where the highest returns exist. If central banks move interest rates higher than expected returns on investment, capitalists will save money. However, if central banks lower interest rates, it can encourage capitalists to invest rather than save. Further, it might encourage them to borrow as well. The theory, then, is that by moving interest rates up or down, the state can influence decisions of whether capitalists invest or lend capital, therefore “heating” or “cooling” the economy.

Keynes also had concerns about the role that interest rates could play in causing excessive inflation or deflation. If investments exceed savings, inflation could occur and if the reverse were true, deflation could occur. That meant controlling interest rates is equally a tool for combating inflation. Economic well-being depends, then, on holding interest rates at a level that keeps savings and investments in line and thus helps stabilize prices. That model remains the key to central bank policy today.

What Keynes added to this understanding was that at times, capitalists might view all other options as money-losing prospects and no matter how low the state moved interest rates, capitalists may still save. Keynes called this a “liquidity trap” and this is exactly the scenario that befell Japanese capitalism in the 1990s. For this reason, Keynes saw manipulating interest rates as only one tool for encouraging investment.

The theory is that interest rates can be used to stimulate investment if real interest rates—that is interest rates adjusted for inflation—are cut to a point that they are negative. However, the Japanese experience illustrates that even if interest rates are negative, capitalists won’t invest if there is not a perceived avenue for investment. A similar dynamic is currently playing out within the U.S. economy. Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke has reduced the target for the Federal Funds rate from 5.25 percent to 1 percent. This has failed to induce lending or investment because there is little for capitalists to invest in that is profitable. Furthermore, central banks only have control of the economic policies within their own countries. It makes the system unstable, because central banks can end up working at cross purposes based on national needs as opposed to having a cohesive view of fiscal policy within the global economy as a whole.

This is why Keynes thought that monetary policy alone was not sufficient for encouraging or discouraging investment. The state itself needed to intervene through fiscal policy. The practical implications flowing from these arguments for Keynes were that the key to driving and sustaining economic growth was stimulating demand. That could be done in a myriad of ways, including, importantly, government fiscal policies intervening into the economy through tax rates, social security, and unemployment benefits, and spending on infrastructure and government services to create jobs.

Keynes conceptualized something called the “multiplier” effect. That is, by pumping $100 into the system at the right place, it could generate significantly more activity. Giving $100 to a worker might mean they immediately spend it at the local grocer. The grocer might then turn around and spend $90 of it himself on something else and so on and so on. On the flip side, giving $100 to a billionaire might not accomplish the same thing because the billionaire has no immediate need for the $100 and is only to going to spend if he sees investment opportunities with high rates of return.

Neoliberal ideology, for its part, rejects the role of fiscal stimulus and puts greater emphasis on monetary policy, which accounts for the predominant role of the Federal Reserve Bank over the past thirty years in dealing with economic problems. In practice, however, neoliberals do have a fiscal policy—cutting taxes on the rich and increasing defense spending. As a result, during the neoliberal era government spending as a percent of GDP and per capita has risen, not fallen. Theoretically, neoliberalism is opposed to state intervention. In practice, military spending and corporate welfare are not only accepted but welcome. Now that the system is in crisis, ideology is discarded, and those who may have crowed loudest for the state to leave the market alone demand that the state intervene to save it.

Prior to Keynes, governments generally viewed balanced budgets as the ideal. Keynes concluded that balancing the budget wasn’t inherently good or bad. Governments should base spending decisions instead on how they wanted to influence aggregate demand within their economies. Keynes understood deficits were inflationary and surpluses deflationary. His point of view was that in a crisis, you used a deficit to spur growth and to overcome deflationary tendencies. When growth was restored, you don’t just balance budgets, you then pay off the debt built up in the crisis.

[b]Keynes and imperialism

One of Keynes’ lasting contributions is his role as one of the main architects of the international financial infrastructure of the postwar world. Keynes was a pivotal player at the international conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July 1944, at which the advanced capitalist nations formed the institutions that would dominate the postwar era. Emerging from the war as the leading military and industrial power, the United States set out to organize the capitalist world economically (through the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and, in 1946, General Agreement on Tarrifs and Trade, the progenitor to the World Trade Organization) as well as militarily (through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization). “Leadership toward a new system of international relationships in trade and other economic affairs will devolve largely upon the United States because of our great economic strength,” wrote Secretary of State Cordell Hull during the war. “We should assume this leadership, and the responsibility that goes with it, primarily for reasons of pure national self-interest.” What were those interests?

Among the aims of the Bretton Woods meetings was to create institutions that could stave off a return of the Great Depression—a major fear at the time. It was also to rebuild capitalism itself in Europe in such a way as to open it—and the rest of the world that the European powers and Japan had dominated through exclusive trade blocs—to an expansion of U.S. trade and investment.

A key linchpin in this agenda was the dollar policy. Coming out of Bretton Woods every currency was pegged to the dollar, which, in turn, was pegged to gold. The fixed exchange rate put a dollar at $35 for an ounce of gold. Currencies would move against the dollar based on whether individual nations had balance of payments problems. If you had a deficit, you had to cut imports or else be forced to devalue. This arrangement more or less held until 1971 when the United States pulled the plug on the gold standard.

At the meetings themselves, Keynes represented British interests and in an attempt to establish Britain as a key junior partner with the United States. However, Britain was simply too weak to play that role. Keynes, for example, called for an International Clearing Union, a new international form of money called the “bancor,” and wanted lending rules that were tilted more toward Britain’s interest. He didn’t exactly get his way. Nevertheless, the institutions that emerged were fundamentally Keynesian institutions designed to play the same stabilizing and stimulus roles in the global economy that governments and central banks played in national economies.

The Bretton Woods institutions eventually took on much broader mandates than rebuilding capitalism in Europe and Asia, and after the crisis of the 1970s, adopted neoliberal loan conditions requiring nations to privatize and deregulate their economies. As Joel Geier writes,

Under the original Bretton Woods system, IMF loans were aimed at preventing devaluation and propping up demand. U.S. capital accepted these Keynesian measures when the U.S. was the major world exporter, ran large trade surpluses, and the rest of the world depended on its currency to pay for those imports. But in the 1980s, the IMF turned all of its previous policies on their heads: It now deliberately imposed devaluation and forced reductions in national income and demand in order to limit imports—all as a means to guarantee repayment of debt to international finance capital.

The point is that whether in their Keynesian or neoliberal phase, these institutions were created to serve the interests of the dominant world powers, chiefly the United States.

Did Keynesianism work?

In theory, Keynesian policies seemed a plausible strategy, especially at a time when nothing else seemed to be working. Yet the first doses of Keynesian-type measures applied in the U.S. in the 1930s, while they had an impact on employment, failed to bring the U.S. out of its slump. Keynes’ explanation was that “the medicine he recommended was too niggardly applied.” This was at the height of President Roosevelt’s heralded New Deal agenda that included farm bills, the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Public Works Administration, the Works Progress Administration, the Wagner Act, the Social Security Act, and other measures all aimed at generating employment, investment, and, ultimately, economic growth. The Great Depression played out in two acts. There was an initial drop to the depths in 1932, a recovery from 1933 to 1936, and then a second drop in 1937 and 1938, even after the initial Keynesian salves had been applied. The economy only decisively recovered in 1939, when the United States began war production for the Allies.

Unemployment in the United States initially peaked at 25 percent in 1933, dropping to 14 percent by 1936. By 1938, it had climbed back up to 19 percent. In terms of industrial production, on an index with 1935–1939 equaling 100, as of 1929, industrial production was at 110. In 1932 it had dropped to 58. By 1937 it had climbed back to 113. But in 1938 it dropped again to 88. National income amounted to $82 billion in 1929. It dropped to $40 billion in 1932. It recovered to $71 billion in 1937, but dropped to $64 billion in 1938.

The war effort created the rise in effective demand—in reality, government war spending, not consumer demand—that Keynesian measures failed to produce. As a result, employment and production, especially of arms, helped stimulate economic growth and an end of the Depression. Keynes himself saw the stimulating effects of the war effort as a vindication of his theories, having commented before the outbreak of war, “It is, it seems, politically impossible for a capitalist democracy to organize expenditure on the scale necessary to make the grand experiment that would prove my case—except in war conditions.” Of course, the cost of this method of recovery—fifty-five million dead—was a brutal price to pay. Moreover, the war played an important role in helping to wipe out and devalue capital and drastically reduce wages, both of which contributed to the restoration of profit rates after the war, but which were not part of Keynes’ remedies for crisis.

Moreover, in adopting these state-led measures, nations were simply returning to the same policies of “war socialism”—“forced savings, controls on money, credit, prices and labor, priorities, rationing, government-borrowings”—that they had put in place during World War I, “despite the ‘orthodox’ approach to economics that prevailed at that time.” It was a sleight of hand for Keynes to now promote war—a product of the unplanned, competitive character of the world system—as proof of his theories. As Mattick notes, “The purpose and meaning of Keynes’ theory was: to provide a way to have full employment in the absence of war or prosperity; and to overcome depression not in the orthodox fashions of waging war or passively awaiting the destructive results of the crisis, but through the new and ‘rational’ method of government-induced demand.”

Keynes’ major contribution to the war was his suggestion to fund efforts through the sale of war bonds. Keynes feared the postwar situation might mean a return to the same demand problems and high unemployment levels that marked the Great Depression. Sales of war bonds would give workers a claim to future funds, which would help stimulate economic activity when the bonds were paid back after the war.

In the end, capitalism did not need this sort of stimulus. The project of rebuilding huge swathes of Europe and Asia provided a massive stimulus for economic growth that lasted for years. The destruction of capital and the cheapening of labor produced a massive stimulus after the war. The U.S. emerged with a project to use its advanced means of production to gain access to markets across the world. At the same time, the rebuilding efforts led to high employment.

Yet there was never a point, except during the war itself, where the United States, or any European country, reached full employment. Though the term full employment was thrown around, in practice it was adjusted to mean, in the words of the American Economic Association in a 1950 report, the “absence of mass unemployment.” Proceedings of the British Royal Institute for International Affairs in 1946 defined full employment as “avoiding that level of unemployment, whatever it may happen to be, which there is good reason to fear may provoke an inconvenient restlessness among the electorate.”

The long boom was in part sustained by a form of Keynesian economics, only not as Keynes himself had envisioned it. The United States did organize expenditures on a massive scale that both stimulated demand but also helped prevent an overproduction of capital. This was in the form of arms spending, or what some termed the “permanent arms economy.” Prior to World War II, peacetime military spending never rose above 1 percent of GDP. In the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, it averaged 7 to 10 percent, and for the entire period from the 1940s until the 1990s it averaged between 4 and 14 percent of GDP. Overall, $4.5 trillion was spent on defense in the forty-seven years after the end of World War II. “It was by way of inflation, debt accumulation, government-induced production, war preparation, and actual warfare that the dominant capitalist nations reached an approximation of full employment,” writes Mattick. “This experience strengthened Keynesianism and led to the widespread belief that a government-maintained ‘quasi-boom’ could be indefinitely continued.”

It was only well into the 1960s that they started to face competitive pressures that unearthed the contradictions. The U.S. was spending huge sums on its arms industry while its most dynamic competitors—Germany and Japan—were reinvesting in new plant and equipment. Those competitors began to outpace the U.S. in the 1970s. In order to retain economic power, the U.S. needed to lower its labor costs relative to Japan and Germany, a difficult task especially important given that it was saddled with heavy arms expenditures when those nations were not. It was this crisis, in which stagnation was accompanied by inflation, that ultimately paved the way for the neoliberal restructuring of capitalism.

The return of Keynesianism?

In practice, neoliberalism did not produce a full break from Keynesianism; and in some important respects the limitations of a return to full Keynesian economic policy are already clear. First of all, interest rate reductions—the first line of defense recommended by Keynes—have already been used under the Fed chair Alan Greenspan (when the economy was in boom) and now by Ben Bernanke (in response to the financial crisis). In the first instance, easy money helped create the housing bubble that formed the basis of the current crisis; and the more recent cuts aimed at lifting the financial crisis have not unfrozen bank lending. Second, the government has already run up large deficits for the past two decades—the federal debt now stands at $10.6 trillion, and the current deficit is set to go up to a $1 trillion next year as new stimulus plans are brought on line. The question is how far can this go? The government can print more money, as it has already begun to do now that the dollar has rebounded; but there is a long-term danger of runaway inflation, which could force them to raise interest rates that put a halt to growth.

Under neoliberalism, Keynesian spending was replaced with the explosion of personal debt to sustain consumption. That was accompanied by a program of tax cuts to the rich and the gutting of government services and payrolls. However, as has become abundantly clear today, the debt at some point needs to be paid back or written off at a huge loss. The high levels of consumer, corporate, and government debt now pose a problem for the system that must be resolved before a growth cycle can resume.

Moreover, it’s unclear whether Keynesian deficits would serve their role. Deficit spending failed to pull Japan, for example, out of its malaise. There’s an association between the postwar boom and Keynesianism. But it’s demonstrable that, in fact, the growth originated not in Keynesian policy, but from other factors, namely the world war and permanent arms spending. Yet arms spending, which at one time helped slow growth rates and prolong the boom, is now one of the exacerbating factors in the crisis.

Certainly, the scale of the crisis has already and will continue to necessitate large-scale state intervention to try and shore up the system. Taxpayers in the U.S. are already on the hook for more than $7.5 trillion to save the banks. How successful these measures will be in preventing a worsening recession, if not a depression, is unclear.

The other problem is that this is a world crisis. No single state can therefore intervene to solve it, and yet the world’s national ruling classes, whom Marx famously called a “band of hostile brothers,” develop policies in their own national interests which can exacerbate the crisis. The individual actions of states can have a mitigating effect on the crisis, and can even alter its form, but they cannot prevent or eliminate them.

Reform and revolution

Keynes, while a critic of neoclassical economics, was no Karl Marx. He “never gave up the idea that capitalism was the best of all possible modes of production.... Keynes championed government intervention in capitalism because he believed that without it, the system he preferred would collapse into economic and political chaos. In other words, Keynes wanted to save capitalism from itself.”38 Keynes provided an explanation for why neoclassical capitalism had failed and purported to provide a road map for a way to reform and stabilize the system rather than scuttle it—at a time when many believed the system had demonstrated its bankruptcy.

Neoliberalism and Keynesianism are alternative capitalist strategies. The crisis of the 1930s accelerated a trend in the world system to move toward greater state intervention and planning. The next major crisis, in the 1970s, initiated a trend toward privatization and deregulation as part of a strategy to restore profitability. Today’s financial crisis is going to lead to another alternative in which some variant of government intervention and regulation is going to be employed. So long as the system survives, the shifts in approaches of world capitalism will develop as strategies to maintain capitalist social relations rather than fundamentally alter them. And though both neoliberalism and Keynesianism in their day were touted as means to overcome the business cycle, neither has proven capable of eliminating the inherent contradictions of the system, expressed in capitalism’s boom-bust cycle.

It is a sign of just how much the economic literacy of the left has deteriorated that Keynesianism—born as a reforming ruling-class economic program—today may become the default position when calling for an alternative to neoliberalism. Yet socialists must make a distinction between those measures of state intervention—such as the bank bailouts—that are measures of state monopoly capitalism designed to save the bankers to the detriment of the working-class taxpayer; and those measures of state intervention that will come as a result of popular demands. Socialists are not indifferent to the reforms—or the struggles to achieve them—that will be necessary to reverse the three decades of capitalist assault on the working class.

As working-class resistance revives in various parts of the globe, the struggles it takes on will be about restoring certain forms of state intervention benefitting the working class and the poor that neoliberalism stripped away. This will involve resisting or attempting to reverse (as is already happening in some places) the privatization of schools, pensions, and utilities, and the restoration or improvement of state welfare measures and unemployment insurance. It will involve the struggle to resist cutbacks in social services such as health care, education, and transportation. At a higher level of class struggle, it may also mean struggles to compel the state to nationalize collapsing industries in order to save jobs. The crisis and demise of neoliberalism creates the ideological climate in which it is possible to both question the priorities of capitalism and to demand more. It is only in and through these struggles for reforms that the working class will revive and become capable of achieving more fundamental change.

Annotated version at:
http://www.isreview.org/issues/63/feat-keynes.shtml

[brother cakes]

from critique of crisis theory (http://critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com/responses-to-readers%E2%80%94austrian-economics-versus-marxism/a-keynesian-takes-on-karl-marx/)


While Marx saw crises as emerging out of “all the contradictions” of capitalist production, bourgeois business cycle theorists like DeLong emphasize the psychological state of the capitalists. (6) This is a natural extension of the view of the modern (bourgeois) economists that value is a subjective thing, as opposed to the view of Marx—and the classical economists—that value is an objective relationship among people engaged in production.

According to the views of the Keynesians, including DeLong, if the capitalists lose “confidence” for whatever reason—perhaps some accidental event like a rise in the price of some key commodity—they slash investments and the economy starts contracting. If only the capitalists could keep up their “animal spirits,” the boom would continue indefinitely.

In the view of Keynes and DeLong, in contrast to that of Marx, crises play no necessary role in capitalist production; they are merely unfortunate accidents. DeLong, who as an eminent professional economist is well trained in both marginalist and Keynesian economics with its subjective or psychological theory of value, cannot but read the materialist, objective Marx through the idealistic and subjective lenses of modern bourgeois economic theory.

DeLong writes, “…Marx is right: sooner or later as capitalist accumulation proceeds there will come a negative shocks [sic] to animal spirits, and there will come a sudden excess demand for money, and there will come a crisis.”

This is DeLong’s, not Marx’s, theory of crises. There are “shocks” that are accidents—though more or less inevitable, but accidents all the same—that make the capitalists suddenly pessimistic about profit-making opportunities after an extended period of excessive “optimism” about profit prospects.

The capitalists react to their sudden pessimism by slashing investment, overall spending plunges, and the demand for money soars. This leads to a “general glut of commodities”—a crisis.

But unlike Marx, who sees crises as temporarily solving the inherent objective contradictions of capitalist production, and therefore playing a necessary role within a mature capitalist system, DeLong strongly believes that crises can be prevented by appropriate fiscal and monetary polices that can and should offset the changing psychological stages of the capitalists.

[Dhalgren]

There seem to be several strands of ideas buttressing and protecting capitalism (at least in the minds of the capitalists and their creatures): "this is the best of all possible systems" - it may not be perfect, but you cannot get any better; and, it doesn't matter whether it is good, bad, or otherwise, it is what happens when humans in general are free to act as they choose - humans will choose to screw over lesser sorts and accumulate as much wealth as possible to themselves, individually, and the devil take the hindmost. If some people can't make it in a capitalist world, well, too bad.

This appears to work as a kind of "good cop/bad cop" scenario. So what do you want? Someone trying to tweak the system to make it better, or someone who just says, "Fuck you!"? In the end you get the same thing...

[Dhalgren]

From the article brother cakes sites:

DeLong believes that in order to preserve the capitalist system, the government can and should follow Keynesian stabilization policies to avoid major economic downturns that threaten the current capitalist—and imperialist—order.

This is something that I have never really understood (of course, among other things). Capitalists and their supporters are very intelligent individuals (even the Austrians) - so how is it that they do not see that something along the lines of Keynesian adjustments is beneficial to their systems overall survival? I understand the near impossibility of regulating and maintaining regulation of capitalism, but that doesn't explain why they don't try and repeatedly try to stabilize their system. It seems counter productive ,particularly for the capitalists as a class...

[anaxarchos]

This article by Petrino DiLeo is really concerned with a different set of issues than Harmon's original which started the OP. Harmon's piece really concerned the general evolution of capitalist economic ideas through the time of Keynes to the (near) present. DiLeo is concerned with the ideological struggle of the present day within capitalist economics. He is quite a bit weaker on the basics in comparison to the other narrative.

Nevertheless, this issue becomes more timely every day. They are clearly "failing" and flailing.

So, is there really such a thing as "neoliberal economics" (as opposed to neoliberal policy)? Is there really an alternative to Keynes which produces a different result?

[Dhalgren]

So, is there really such a thing as "neoliberal economics" (as opposed to neoliberal policy)? Is there really an alternative to Keynes which produces a different result?

Has there been any response to the crises since Keynes, by any government, that has not been some variation of Keynesian-ism? And (one other question), do the Libertarian-leaning economists hold (in real life) that government has no role in dealing with the recurring crises?

[anaxarchos]

Has there been any response to the crises since Keynes, by any government, that has not been some variation of Keynesian-ism? And (one other question), do the Libertarian-leaning economists hold (in real life) that government has no role in dealing with the recurring crises?

I think the answers are "no" and "no"... What there has been is a propensity to steal while "stimulating" (tax cuts are a combination of theft and demand generation with the ratio rising toward the former as the targeted bracket rises). The universal demand for austerity could be argued as neoliberal but it is just as easily explained by their overarching fear of inflation.

I think "Austrian Economics" was not only obscure; it was entirely contentless. The psychological schools (marginalists, behaviorists, etc.) are just as bankrupt. They have nothing... no "victories" of any sort.

More mysterious is why the resurgent Keynesians have not really been proposing Keynesian "solutions". "Government can't create real jobs...", yadda, yadda. Absolute horseshit. Who believes such fairy tales?

I read a book a decade ago, which I can't remember the name of, which claimed that "Keynesian solutions" were not really Keynesian. The author argued that the general Keynesian direction emboldened certain politicians who then did shit which kinda worked, which the Keynesias then adopted as their own...

Yikes... Bourgeois politicians leading the Keynesians? Might as well ask for the return of the Knights of Malta.

[Dhalgren]

This from the original article:

Keynes's only mistake, Strachey held, was that he thought the capitalists or their political parties would introduce such remedies of their own volition. In fact it required pressure from below, from the workers' parties and unions. 'The Keynesian remedies...will be opposed by the capitalists certainly: but experience shows they can be imposed by the electorate'.52 Keynes helped 'the democratic and democratic socialist forces to find a way of continuously modifying the system, in spite of the opposition of the capitalist interests... And in doing so he helped show the peoples of the West a way forward which did not lead across the bourne of total class war...

This is the worst kind of "faith-based" crap, yet. Liberal democracies are bourgeois dictatorships. The only way any regulation of capitalism is allowed is if it can be shown to be of benefit to the owner class. How is it that someone with Strachey's background could make such a ridiculous statement so blithely? Was it simply the drug of post-war prosperity? Is that what blinded he and others who should have known better?

[anaxarchos]

This from the original article:


This is the worst kind of "faith-based" crap, yet. Liberal democracies are bourgeois dictatorships. The only way any regulation of capitalism is allowed is if it can be shown to be of benefit to the owner class. How is it that someone with Strachey's background could make such a ridiculous statement so blithely? Was it simply the drug of post-war prosperity? Is that what blinded he and others who should have known better?

Prosperity goes a very long way... There is also the very powerful drug of self-delusion on the question of how far one can go electorally (especially as all other options seem to recede - for a time).

Webb smokes that drug as well...

"In fact it required pressure from below, from the workers' parties and unions. 'The Keynesian remedies...will be opposed by the capitalists certainly: but experience shows they can be imposed..."

You hear this every day from Democrats. The Keynesian remedies are in fact capitalist remedies. When the capitalists cease to support them, they are no longer "imposed".

Of course, there are also proletarian "remedies"... but they ain't imposed by "pressure"... and they ain't "Keynesian".

[anaxarchos]

Revamped WPA To Create 50,000 New Jobs By Disassembling, Reassembling Hoover Dam

January 7, 2011 | ISSUE 47•01 (http://www.theonion.com/issue/4701/)

WASHINGTON—In an effort to boost the economy and promote job growth, representatives from the newly revived Works Progress Administration announced Thursday their plan to dismantle, piece by piece, the 3.25 million cubic yards of concrete forming the Hoover Dam, and then immediately rebuild it. "This is a vital initiative," said WPA director Ted Doogan, who was appointed last week. "Systematically tearing down such a massive edifice will create at least 25,000 jobs over the next five years. And then reassembling it, using all the same pieces in the exact same configuration, will employ another 25,000 workers. America is back." Other public works projects currently underway include the bulldozing of libraries, the burning of national forests, and the defacing of public murals, which will be followed by a massive plan to rebuild libraries, revive national forests, and repaint public murals.




http://o.onionstatic.com/img/icons/onion_tiny.png




http://www.theonion.com/articles/revamped-wpa-to-create-50000-new-jobs-by-disassemb,18727/

[Dhalgren]

You The Onion is funny, but this is how many folks view "government" jobs - as "make work". When you have to eat, pay rent, support kids and pay medical bills any job that pays money seems pretty damned real. And, you know what? There really is a whole lot of shit to tear down in this bloody country. Demolition is legitimate work - especially in the US!

[anaxarchos]

You The Onion is funny, but this is how many folks view "government" jobs - as "make work". When you have to eat, pay rent, support kids and pay medical bills any job that pays money seems pretty damned real. And, you know what? There really is a whole lot of shit to tear down in this bloody country. Demolition is legitimate work - especially in the US!

It is how Liberal Democratic politicians see it as well... and even the "radicals".

"What will they do if we were to hire them?"

"They could make steel, grow crops, take care of babies..."

"Nah, that wouldn't be efficient."

"But, but, they are doing NOTHING now. How 'efficient' is that?"

"Nah, we don't do that here. That would make fledgling entrepreneurs feel bad."

[Dhalgren]

It is how Liberal Democratic politicians see it as well... and even the "radicals".

"What will they do if we were to hire them?"

"They could make steel, grow crops, take care of babies..."

"Nah, that wouldn't be efficient."

"But, but, they are doing NOTHING now. How 'efficient' is that?"

"Nah, we don't do that here. That would make fledgling entrepreneurs feel bad."

Man, them is the feelingest bunch of vampires I ever heard of! They got "invisible hands" and "value is a psychological thing" and "human nature makes us do this stuff" and all that "feeling free" and things...shit... They are just one big nerve cell...