My name is Lakshmi but, yes, I do not agree with Mattick. We are NOT seeing the limits of Keynesianism, as Mattick predicted, but rather a valid reinterpretation of Keynesianism as right wing demand management.
The point of policy is to raise effective demand not through increased government employment-creating expenditures and higher consumption resulting from the redistribution of income but through pro-business incentives to increase private investment and through neo-mercantilist policy to raise net exports. The latter right wing demand management is fully defensible from within a Keynesian or even Kaleckian framework though of course neo-mercantilist policy suffers ultimately from a fallacy of composition. The question that I am raising is not why austerity but why right wing demand management rather than social democratic or liberal left economic management? Is it because the parties are bought by capital, as Sachs says in his reformulation of the thesis that the state is the executive committee for the management of the affairs of the bourgeoisie? But is right wing demand management which is not working really in the interest of capital or a dominant bloc within it? Investment is not soaring; deflation threatens a downward spiral, no? Is the use of right wing demand management mainly the result of the passivity of the oppressed? But then why the passivity of the oppressed? Or are there structural reasons for the use of right wing over social democratic management? Is it the fear of full employment as incompatible with labor discipline? Or are there other structural reasons? I would ask you to think this through Proyect, but we know that you are not capable of that. Your mission after all is to discredit Marxism. Lakshmi
_______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list pen-l@lists.csuchico.edu https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
