On Mon, 23 Jun 2008 19:57:46 -0500 Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> writes:
>
>
> Alex Hogan wrote:
> >
>
> > I'm wondering how you would interpert FDR
> > and the New Deal based on
>
> He did a very good job of bottling up any resistance with miminal
> reforms. The one New Deal measure that threatened to be more, the
> WPA,
> was hurriedly shut down. He failed to end the depresion, which was
> threatening to worsen when the war came along.
The period of FDR's administrations are often viewed as the first time in American history that the Federal government attempted to apply Keynesian-type policies to cope with an economic downturn. However, the degree of fiscal and monetary stimulus applied under the Roosevelt Administration was woefully inadequate to the task at hand. It is interesting note that Paul Sweezy in his 192 book, *A Theory of Capitalist Development* gave an explanation as to why this should have been the case. Sweezy in that book, embraced Keynesian economic analysis to a very large extent. He saw Keynesian analysis as being congruent to Marx's analysis of realization crises. So while agreeing with the Keynesians that sufficiently aggressive fiscal and monetary policies could overcome capitalism's tendencies to stagnation, he argued that capital would be resistant to such policies since they would tend to erode capital's share of national income to the benefit of labor. Hence, capitalist governments, on this analysis, could not be expeced to apply Keynesian-style economic policies in a sufficiently aggressive and consistent manner to overcome the capitalist system's tendency to lapse back into stagnation.
Jim F.
>
> Carrol
>
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