Marx vs. Keynes

Sunday Morning at the Marxist Library

Sunday, December 4, 2011, 10:30 AM - 12:30 PM

*Marx vs. Keynes*

Radicals have no monopoly on questioning the viability of capitalism itself in today’s crisis. In the September 14 issue of Business Week the capitalist ideologue Peter Coy expressed his own trepidation as he pointed to the relevance of Karl Marx to the current crisis in a long article. Here is the conclusion:

“Now, once again, unbridled capitalism is threatening to undermine itself. The world’s biggest banks, financially weak but politically powerful, are putting the screws on borrowers in an attempt to rescue their own balance sheets. Likewise, creditor nations such as China and Germany are attempting to shift the pain of rebalancing onto debtor nations, even though squeezing them too hard threatens to cause an economic and financial disaster.

“It’s time for another burst of enlightenment. In years past, Britain’s John Maynard Keynes and America’s Hyman P. Minsky (author of Stabilizing an Unstable Economy) did capitalism a service by diagnosing its tendency toward crisis and advising on ways to make things better. The sooner policymakers today ‘recognize we’re facing a once-in-a-lifetime crisis of capitalism,’ as Magnus writes, ‘the better equipped they will be to manage a way out of it.’ Grasping the ways in which Marx was right is the first step toward making sure that his predictions of capitalism’s downfall remain wrong.”

Today’s leading Keynesian, Paul Krugman, supports the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement and a radical boost in government spending to put people back to work. Robert Reich, another proponent of a Keynesian solution, gave the Mario Savio Memorial Lecture to several thousand at the Occupy Berkeley and Occupy Oakland solidarity rally on November 16.

What did Marx anticipate about a Keynesian type of “burst of enlightenment,” like the one in the 1930s when it was put into practice, and what is distinctive about Marx’s approach for today’s crisis that can help the OWS movement?

Sunday, December 4, 2011, 10:30 AM - 12:30 PM
6501 Telegraph Ave., Oakland, CA 94609

Speakers Ron Kelch and Raj Sahai

Sponsored by the Institute for Critical Study of Society