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In the latest issue of Catalyst, there's an effusive review by James Mongiovi of James Crotty's new book "Keynes Against Capitalism: His Economic Case for Liberal Socialism". Titled "Was Keynes a Socialist", it makes the case that his writings are definitely anti-capitalist but avoids pinning the label socialist on him. If you are going to write such a review, you have to deal with the obvious differences between Marxian socialism and the "liberal socialism" that Keynes defended in interviews with The Nation and other magazines. Mongiovi quotes Keynes on Marx:
“My feelings about Das Kapital are the same as my feelings about the Koran. I know that it is historically important and I know that many people, not all of whom are idiots, find it a sort of Rock of Ages and containing inspiration. Yet when I look into it, it is to me inexplicable that it can have this effect. Its dreary, out-of-date, academic controversialising seems so extraordinarily unsuitable as material for the purpose.”
Since, as far as I understand it, both Crotty and Mongiovi are post-Keynesians, or at least straddle Marxism and post-Keynesianism, this is a quote that might make the case for Keynes as a socialist of any sort rather untenable. Here's how Mongiovi explains it away:
"Keynes was never quite willing to give Marx his due on the matter of aggregate demand. His distaste for Marx appears to have been an aesthetic reaction rather than ideological or scientific in nature; I suspect that Keynes was allergic to Marx’s dense Teutonic prose. Be that as it may, Crotty, without explicitly making the point, enables us to see that Keynes was an instinctive dialectician."
I am not sure about an instinctive dialectics. I studied Hegel in some depth when I was in graduate school and I rather doubt any of his methods that influenced Marx so much can be put on the same level as the sex drive or any other instinct. As for aesthetic reaction and dense Teutonic prose, I find Marx much clearer than Keynes myself:
"Our normal psychological law that, when the real income of the community increases or decreases, its consumption will increase or decrease but not so fast, can, therefore, be translated — not, indeed, with absolute accuracy but subject to qualifications which are obvious and can easily be stated in a formally complete fashion — into the propositions that ΔCw and ΔYw have the same sign, but ΔYw > ΔCw, where Cw is the consumption in terms of wage-units. This is merely a repetition of the proposition already established on p. 29 above."
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