raghu quotes Bad [sic] DeLong: > What I do not understand is Marx's rejection of monetarist or > Keynesian solutions.
How could Marx reject Keynesianism, which didn't exist at the time? He did reject a 19th century type of monetarism, but I'll leave that to someone else to explain. It's true however, that MarxISTS (such as Paul Mattick) have rejected Keynesian stimulus, as simply delaying economic crises. (What's needed, in this view, is the destruction of capital that's been over-accumulated.) There are a lot of other criticisms, such as Kalecki's view that financiers and other capitalists hate full employment (unless labor can be tamed using fascism). deLong shouldn't rely on Marx alone. > Marx says the ancient and feudal modes of > production did not have crises. Marx's theory -- which he didn't take far since the object of his theory was capitalism -- involved non-capitalist crises. They were due to "natural" causes, such as bad weather, plagues, etc. They were not "aggregate demand failure" crises of the capitalist sort (i.e., breaking the M-C-M' chain due to falling profit rates). That is, it's not "no crisis vs. crisis" between types of social systems but instead a distinction between different _types_ of crisis. > Why not? Because they used their > surplus for crusade or war or display or elite consumption and not for > accumulation, hence the surplus was recycled into demand for labor and > there was never any of the interruptions of M-C-M' that we get under > the capitalist mode of production when capitalists lose confidence > that if they turn their M into C they will then be able to turn it > back into M'. For the government to see the surplus for public > betterment in a downturn would seem to be just as effective a cure for > depression under the CMP as conquering Gaul is under the AMP or > building a cathedral is under the FMP. [the feudal mode of production?] Under the CMP or capitalism, a standard Keynesian method to deal with bad times (that "Bad" refers to) is for the government to stimulate _demand_ by building infrastructure, etc., while hoping that it helps supply in the long run. (Of course, that isn't the only way to do it.) In a non-capitalist mode of production, in contrast, conquering Gaul (which was actually done by the Romans, before the feudal mode of production arose) would increase the _supplies_ of food, slaves, and the like. To my mind, building a cathedral is dealing with seasonal unemployment in a primarily agricultural economy, providing people with food etc. between harvests times. It also helped avoid social disorder, since "idle hands are the devil's playground," while providing a spectacle to legitimize the power of the Church. BTW, Brenner applies his interpretation of Marx to explain crises under feudalism. The idea is that because the social surplus was wasted on wars between feudal statelets and on such things as building cathedrals, feudalism was not technically dynamic in terms of raising labor productivity in agriculture. Instead, to raise the surplus-product (and the amount of food available to feed non-farmers), the land-owners "squeezed" the agricultural producers, raising the amount of unpaid labor the latter did on the lord's land, etc. (In analogy to Marx's volume I concepts, "absolute" surplus-abstraction replaced "relative" surplus-extraction.) Because of the limits on that squeezing, the food supply didn't keep up with the population, encouraging non-Malthusian _demographic_ crises. > I think—I am not sure, but I think—Marx's rejection of a monetarist or > Keynesian cure is based in part on the fact that Marx is like Ron > Paul: he believes there's something wrong about credit. The liquidity > the government creates by printing money is to Marx, I think, fake > liquidity that is bound to come to a bad end. The only real liquidity > for Marx gold. As Doug points out, Marx has a lot of stuff about credit in volume III. He really didn't deal with questions government finance. This is why people like me (and Doug?) fill in a lot of Marx's gaps using Keynes. It's a mistake to think that any single thinker should have the answer to all questions, as "Bad" does. Marx assumed gold money because it was the money of his time. It also made his exposition of the "law of value" easier. I don't see why he couldn't deal with fiat money. He saw fiat money as possibly prevailing within countries, forced by governments, while international money was gold. With a world government -- or a reasonable approximation such as U.S. hegemony -- we can have international fiat money. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
