Are Keynes and Marx Compatible?
Leave a comment16/10/2015 by socialistfight
He says he has another, and previously unheard of, solution to the struggle between Marxists underconsumptionists (Keynesians) and falling rate of profit Marxists. And that there is something in the undercopnsumption theories, though it is wrong in overall. I have not yet discovered what the new ‘solution’ might be.
“But the planned economy of the transition period, even though based upon the law of value, violates it at every step and fixes relationships of unequal exchange between different branches of the economy, in the first instance between industry and agriculture… For the whole force of these formulas lies in the fact that they disregard budgets and plans and tariffs and, in general, all forms of governmentally planned intervention, and that they bring out the necessary lawfulness in the play of the blind forces of the market, disciplined by the law of value. Were the internal Soviet market “freed” and the monopoly of foreign trade abolished, then the exchange between city and village would become incomparably more equal and accumulation in the in the village — kulak or farmer– capitalist accumulation, course — would take its course, and it would soon become evident that Marx’s formulas apply also to agriculture.”
- 332 Writings of Leon Trotsky (1930)
In the October 2010 issue of Monthly Review, John Bellamy Foster has an article that praises once again the work of John Maynard Keynes. In this article, Foster presents evidence that perhaps the most important ideas that distinguished Keynes of the “General Theory” from the traditional marginalist economists of the time were inspired by Karl Marx himself. Foster’s latest article has drawn criticism from some corners of the Internet to the effect that Foster and Monthly Review are advocating Keynesian ideas rather than Marxism.
This is not a new charge against the Monthly Review School. Paul Sweezy, the founder of Monthly Review, never hid the fact that he was strongly influenced not only by Marx but by Keynes. Foster’s article in the October 2010 Monthly Review―and other recent articles by Foster along the same lines―combine with two other developments that raise anew the relationship between the economic theories…
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