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This book sees Keynes as neither villain nor hero and develops a sympathetic ‘left’ critique. Keynes was an avowedly elitist and pro-capitalist economist, whom the left should appropriate with caution. But his analysis provides insights at a level of concreteness which Marx’s analysis largely ignored and which were concerned with issues of the modern world which Marx could not have foreseen. A critical Marxist engagement can simultaneously increase the power of Keynes’s insight and enrich Marxism. To understand Keynes, whose work is liberally invoked but seldom read, the book first puts Keynes in context, explaining his biography and the extraordinary times in which he lived, his philosophy and his politics. The book describes Keynes’s developing critique of ‘the classics’, of mainstream economics as he found it, and summarises the General Theory. It shows how Keynes provides an enduringly valuable critique of orthodoxy but vital insights rather than a genuinely general theory. The book then develops a Marxist appropriation of Keynes’s insights. It argues that Marxist analysis of unemployment, of money and interest, and of the role of the state can be enriched through such a critical engagement. The book addresses Keynesianism after Keynes, critically reviewing the practices that came to be known as ‘Keynesianism’ and different theoretical traditions that have claimed his legacy. It considers the crisis of the 1970s, the subsequent anti-Keynesian turn, the economic and ecological crises of the twenty-first century, and the prospects of returning to Keynes and Keynesianism.
“Classics”’, would have it, here the attempted reconciliation with the mainstream is overt and Keynes’s criticisms become a special case of the system he was criticising. Second, the chapter looks at market imperfections, considering alternative New Keynesian and ‘post-Keynesian’ accounts, with briefer notes on money and financial instability. Despite declarations of mutual hostility, the relatively moderate New Keynesians and the putatively more radical post-Keynesians have much in common. As Shaikh ( 2016 ) has argued, the emphasis for both remains on imperfections
this volume. Part of the reason for the rarity of post-prefixes in economics may be that economists are much more sympathetic towards the prefixes ‘neo’ and ‘new’. The two editions of the New Palgrave contain entries for ‘neo-classical’, neoclassical synthesis, neoclassical growth theory, neo-Ricardian economics, new classical macroeconomics, new economic geography, new institutional economics, new Keynesian macroeconomics, and new open economy macroeconomics. The prefixes ‘new’ and ‘neo’ can even be
the old economic orthodoxy as ‘microeconomics’, which could proceed as if the Keynesian revolution had never happened. A second strand is distinguished here in its emphasis on ‘market imperfections’. For ‘new-Keynesians’ this implies that the mainstream claims of market efficiency need not hold. It can lead to some profound criticisms of conventional thinking and crude pro-market policy proposals. For example, Stiglitz, the ‘godfather’ of New Keynesianism (Mott 1989 ), opposed the International Monetary Fund (IMF) structural adjustment programmes and austerity in
Balls explained it to me, the days of traditional macro intervention were over. Micro was the new macro: I was very influenced by what you would call new Keynesianism … very much about imperfections in the way the micro foundations of the economy worked and what you did about that … So, in that sense we tried to make the Treasury more worried about the micro foundations, because I think that's where I thought the intellectual energy was at that time. You know, it wasn't old-style Keynesian or old
Theory accepts this smallness, abstracting from the real conditions of monopoly. But even small firms are seldom price-takers in any literal sense. In some industries something close to this may occur, such as when a farmer takes her stock to auction. But it is atypical. Firms often decide on the selling price before goods leave the factory. Many consumer goods are literally manufactured with the price on the box. A mainstream or ‘New Keynesian’ literature simultaneously acknowledges and trivialises these processes as ‘menu costs’, but it is the free market which is
much larger state than in those years, the existence of a social ‘safety net’ and the belief that government had a responsibility for the common good in periods of crisis. In other words, the Thatcherism and the neoliberal ‘revolution’ constrained classical Keynesian notions and moved them a long way down the economic policy agenda, but they were not removed altogether. Indeed, the pre-crisis policy regime has been described in terms of ‘new Keynesianism’ (Hall, 2013: 146). Furthermore, because the government’s crisis The advent of crisis and the building of
implied in Beveridge’s report’, and that the ‘way to build a prosperous economy lies in social renewal’.12 The second dominant approach was informed by a Keynesian response to the deficit crisis, which advocated public investment to stimulate job creation and economic growth. The new Keynesians in and around Labour shared with Blue Labour the understanding that capitalism was unstable and prone to crisis, however they did not share its critical approach to the State. The central point of Keynesian economists was that the State should concentrate on creating employment
exposed to one economic perspective – is relatively new. As Chris Giles, the Economics Editor of the Financial Times, has put it: There was a time when any self-respecting economics undergraduate could distinguish between neo-Keynesian, new-Keynesian and postKeynesian thinking; they would write essays on the difference between Marxist and monetarist policies; and they would have to know how classical economists, such as Adam Smith, influenced the neoclassical school and how new classical economics developed subsequently in the 1970s. Economics teaching was about