> 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).
Keynes (who wasn't a Keynesian) shared Marx's view of "the utilitarian ethics and the utilitarian psychology" from which neoclassical economics derives.
As I’ve pointed out before, Marx called Bentham “a genius in the way of bourgeois stupidity.”
“Jeremy Bentham, that insipid, pedantic, leather-tongued oracle of the ordinary bourgeois intelligence of the 19th century. Bentham is among philosophers what Martin Tupper is among poets. Both could only have been manufactured in England.” http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch24.htm
Keynes, who foolishly called Marxism the "reductio ab absurdum of Benthamism," described Benthamism as
"the worm which has been gnawing at the insides of modern civilisation and is responsible for its present moral decay. We used to regard the Christians as the enemy, because they appeared as the representatives of tradition, convention and hocus-pocus. In truth it was the Benthamite calculus, based on an over-valuation of the economic criterion, which was destroying the quality of the popular Ideal." (Keynes, Collected Writings, vol. X, pp. 445-6)
Keynes also shared Marx's view of capitalism as a system embodying mistaken values (in the form of "the dependence on an intense appeal to the money-making and money-loving instincts of individuals as the main motive force of the economic machine") which were nevertheless necessary means for the creation of the economic basis of an "ideal social republic." Once capitalism has completed its task, we will be free
“to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue—that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.” <http://www.eco.utexas.edu/~hmcleave/368keynesgrandchildrentable.pdf>
Ted