On Sun, 1 Apr 2007 20:28:29 -0400 "Charles Brown"
<cbrown at michiganlegal.org> writes:
>
>
>
>
> Sean Andrews
>
> I think the problem with Marxist in the Keynesian era was that it
> largely got taken into the fold of the Cold War/New Deal. It became
> accepted that the free market utopia that Marx was largely building
> on
> was unlikely to be resumed for obvious political (and seemingly
> economic) reasons. Thus, at least as Anderson puts it in
> /Considerations on Western Marxism/, using Sweezy as an example:
>
> Blockquote:
> Sweezy's book, written in the environment of the New Deal,
> implicitly
> renounced the assumption that crises of disproportionality or
> underconsumption were insurmountable within thecapitalist mode of
> production, and accepted the potential efficacy of Keynsian
> counter-cyclical interventions by the State to assure the internal
> stability of imperialism. The ultimate disintegration of capitalism
> was for the first time entrusted to a purely external determinant -
> the superior economic performance of the Soviet Union and the
> countries which could be expected to follow its path at the end of
> the
> War, whose 'persuasion effect' would eventually render possible a
> peaceful transition to socialism in the United States itself.
> Within
> this conception, /The Theory of Capitalist Development/ marked the
> end
> of an intellectual age (23).
>
> I'm kind of a sucker for anything Anderson writes, though, so maybe
> he's being hyperbolic here.
>
> ^^^^^^^
>
> CB; Take a look at works of Victor Perlo, Marxist economist from the
> Cold
> War era or other CP and Soviet economists from the Cold War era.
> They don't
> say anything about Keynsian counter-cyclical interventions by the
> State
> assuring the internal stability of imperialism. One of Perlo's books
> is
> entitled _The Unstable Economy_.
I am not sure that Sweezy necessarily did either. If I understand his position correctly, while he argued that crises of underconsumption could be overcome via Keynesian interventions, he held that the capitalist state would engage in such interventions only when it was under the threat of a possible workers' revolt, which was indeed the case back during the New Deal era. Capitalists would accept such interventions with reluctance because Keynesian economic policies when followed over the long term would tend to diminish the share of national income that goes to capital. Presumably, if the threats posed to the capitalist ruling class posed domestically by labor and externally by the Soviet bloc were to be eliminated then the state would begin to shy away from engaging in Keynesian interventions. And that indeed seems to be the case.
>
>
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