[lbo-talk] Stiglitz on Piketty in Harper's

Charles Brown cb31450 at gmail.com
Tue Sep 2 07:29:16 PDT 2014


Paul Sweezy's words from 72 years ago seem a propos here:

"The critique of Keynesian theories of liberal capitalist reform starts … not from their economic logic [which is sound] but rather from their faulty (usually implicit) assumptions about the relationship, or perhaps one should say lack of relationship, between economics and political action. The Keynesians tear the economic system out of its social context and treat it as though it were a machine to be sent to the repair shop there to be overhauled by an engineer state.

"The presupposition of liberal reform is that the state in capitalist society is, at least potentially, an organ of society as a whole which can be made to function in the interests of society as a whole. Now historically … the state in capitalist society has always been first and foremost the guarantor of capitalist property relations. "


>From Paul Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development, pp. 348-9

^^^^^^ CB: Thereby, Keynesians act as if private enterprise systems are "centrally" organized, centrally PLANNED socialist economy, which it is not. "Centrally" planned means the _whole_ is planned. Capitalist systems have anarchy of production ( see Engels comment below) and are not planned as a whole. Individual enterprises plan , but "the" economy as a whole is not. (The metaphor of "center" is from the center of a circle as representing the whole circle)

The Soviet economy was centrally planned because it was following Marx's idea of ending anarchy of production.

Anarchy of production is part of the theoretical basis of crisis as inherent to capitalism. The other theoretical cause: "The ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as opposed to the drive of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as though only the absolute consuming power of society constituted their limit." https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch30.htm

Keynes' theory is precisely to cut poverty and unrestrict the consumption of the masses to some extent.

"We have seen that the capitalistic mode of production thrust its way into a society of commodity-producers, of individual producers, whose social bond was the exchange of their products. But every society based upon the production of commodities has this peculiarity: that the producers have lost control over their own social inter-relations. Each man produces for himself with such means of production as he may happen to have, and for such exchange as he may require to satisfy his remaining wants. No one knows how much of his particular article is coming on the market, nor how much of it will be wanted. No one knows whether his individual product will meet an actual demand, whether he will be able to make good his costs of production or even to sell his commodity at all. Anarchy reigns in socialized production. "

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch03.htm



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