The history of class struggle: From original accumulation to neoliberalism

Monthly Review

Volumn 49, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 28-48

  Van Der Pijl, Kees ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0347803649     PISSN: 00270520     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.14452/MR-049-01-1997-05_3     Document Type: Article

References (4)

1. "Classic" as distinguished from what passes for "conservative" in the United States these days. One need not be any kind of conservative to prefer the former to the latter. Keynes was by no means a fan of capitalism, which he once characterized as "a congeries of possessors and pursuers" more suited to presiding over a gambling casino than an economy. But his distaste for the greedy and unscrupulous scramblers of this system - in which he functioned successfully as a financial speculator for his university and himself - was much exceeded by his scorn for socialism. U.S. "Conservatives" today have a nostalgic fervor for a capitalism that never existed or, to the degree that it did, was as mindless as it was heartless - "capitalism with the gloves off," in Harold Laski's mid-1930s description of fascism: now in the American mode, for better and for worse.
2. It may be added that the doyen of U.S laissez-faire capitalist thought since the Second World War has been Milton Friedman - once the prime product, subsequently the main shill, for the "Chicago School" - the very "school" (called "Los Chicago Boys") that guided the economic policies of Pinochet's fascist Chile. Friedman had picked up his ethico-mental infirmity from the Austrian Ludwig von Mises, via the Austrian Friedrich A. von Hayek. The latter's influential Road to Serfdom (1946) used the term "serfdom" to describe the meaning of the New Deal. Were it not for his economic illiteracy one could guess that Newt (von) Gingrich, like Friedman found his soul's inspiration in von Hayek's hymnal to social cruelty - the beginnings of what over time has become the Second Coming of the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus.
3. Compare this position of the "conservative" Keynes with any "conservative" today: The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes. Thus our argument leads towards the conclusion that in contemporary conditions the growth of wealth, so far from being dependent on the abstinence of the rich, as is commonly supposed, is more likely to be impeded by it. One of the chief social justifications of great inequality of wealth is, therefore, removed. The quotes are taken from pp. 372-73 of The General Theory, Chapter 24, entitled "Concluding Notes On The Social Philosophy Towards Which the General Theory Might Lead." A fuller discussion of this, and all relevant policy matters, as well as a systematic rundown of the entire theory providing the best next-step for those seeking more after Turgeon's work is the excellent book of Dudley Dillard The Economics of John Maynard Keynes (New York: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1948). But The General Theory itself should be read both as a work of mainstream economics at its rare best, and also as a work of economic art.
4. Compare this position of the "conservative" Keynes with any "conservative" today: The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes. Thus our argument leads towards the conclusion that in contemporary conditions the growth of wealth, so far from being dependent on the abstinence of the rich, as is commonly supposed, is more likely to be impeded by it. One of the chief social justifications of great inequality of wealth is, therefore, removed. The quotes are taken from pp. 372-73 of The General Theory, Chapter 24, entitled "Concluding Notes On The Social Philosophy Towards Which the General Theory Might Lead." A fuller discussion of this, and all relevant policy matters, as well as a systematic rundown of the entire theory providing the best next-step for those seeking more after Turgeon's work is the excellent book of Dudley Dillard The Economics of John Maynard Keynes (New York: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1948). But The General Theory itself should be read both as a work of mainstream economics at its rare best, and also as a work of economic art.