This was a crisis that only Marxist economics could explain, not Keynes. Indeed, in a way, the strategists of capital recognised that too. Their aim was to raise the profitability of capital at all costs as the only way out – not to revert to Keynesian ‘demand management’. Even Keynes in his later years seemed to think that his policies were only to be used temporarily before reverting to traditional neoclassical economics – namely government stays away from interfering in markets and capitalist production and lets the market do its work. “I do not suppose that the (neo) classical medicine will work by itself or that we can depend on it. We need quicker and less painful aids. But in the long run, these expedients will work better and we shall need them less, if the classical medicine is also at work. And if we reject the medicine from our systems altogether, we may just drift on from expedient to expedient and never get really fit again.” Keynes 1946 Keynes thought that Marxist economics had nothing to offer. He considered that Das Kapital was “an obsolete economic textbook which I know to be not only scientifically erroneous, but without interest or application to the modern world”. Marx’s ideas were “characterised… by mere logical fallacy” and was a “doctrine so illogical and dull”. But in the 1970s, when Keynesian economics was in crisis, was what Marx saying about the capitalist economy erroneous and without application to the modern world? On the contrary: Marx said that the key to understanding the capitalist mode of production lay in the nature of production to sell commodities on a market for profit. Profit was the key. And contrary to the views of capitalist economics, both neoclassical and Keynesian, value and surplus value (profit) came from the labour of the working class. Those that owned the means of production could appropriate the value of the commodities and selling them on the market for money. The workers got their wages but did not get the full value of what they produced. The difference was profit for the capitalists. thenextrecession.wordpress/2013/08/22/marx-versus-keynes-in-the-summer/
Posted on: Wed, 28 Aug 2013 12:53:38 +0000
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