Chris Harman har nyligen skrivit en artikel om 30-talets ekonomiska kris. I den finns en kort diskussion om Keynes som adresserar samma tema om reformismens gräns/möjlighetsbetingelser som jag var inne på i föregående post. Hela artikeln finns på denna adress, men det var i synnerhet följande jag tänkte på:

Much recent comment has assumed John Maynard Keynes had an answer to the slump which politicians ignored. He did not. He brilliantly tore apart the argument of those economists who claimed it would solve itself if wages were to fall. But his own proposal could not have ended it. For instance, a call that he backed from former British prime minister Lloyd George for public works could not have shaved more than 11 percent off the 100 percent growth in unemployment between 1930 and 1933.

Every proposal Keynes made, notes his biographer Skidelsky, was tailored to take “into account the psychology of the business community. In practice he was very cautious indeed”. Thus a series of articles Keynes wrote for the Times in 1937 suggested that Britain was approaching boom conditions, even though unemployment remained at 12 percent. He was only too aware that capitalists would shy away from any policy which seemed likely to damage profits in the short term. And so, in practice, he avoided recommendations which might frighten them.

Glyn and Howell have argued that to provide the three million jobs needed to restore full employment at the deepest point of the slump would have required an increase in government spending of some 56 percent. Such an increase was not possible in Britain using the “gradualist” methods acceptable to Keynes, since it would have led directly to a flight of capital abroad, a rise in imports, a balance of payments deficit and a steep rise in interest rates. Carrying it through would have required “the transformation of the British economy into a largely state controlled, if not planned, economic system”. So, when government expenditure did start to grow and cut unemployment, it was, according to Eichengreen, “due more to Mr Hitler than Mr Keynes”, with growth by 5 percent in the proportion of GNP going into arms, creating some 1.5 million jobs by 1938. A successful Keynes-type policy in the US “would have had to approach the size of government expenditures during the Second World War”.

In his General Theory Keynes hinted at the failings of capitalism being too deep for merely monetary and fiscal measures to deal with, advancing his own version of falling profit rates (the “declining marginal efficiency of capital”) and saw radical action with the “socialisation of investment” as the only effective counter-slump measure. But he never tried seriously to advance this solution—since under normal peacetime circumstances socialisation of investment is not possible without taking control of capital itself away from the capitalists.