Keynes and the Crisis: A Case of Mistaken Identity

Mann's article makes a large number of brave and substantial claims about Keynes and 'Keynesian reason' in the context of contemporary capitalism and Left politics. But this depth and breadth makes the article problematic as well as significant, for the simple reason that Mann is unable to fully substantiate all of the claims in question. This commentary critically considers one such claim, concerning the relation between Keynes, Keynesianism, and neoliberalism.

Brooklyn Rail, 2017

A critical review of Varoufakis' "Adults in the Room"

Australian Journal of Politics & History, 2010

Anthropological Theory, 2021

Many anthropologists interpret neoliberalism as a radical break from and dangerous rupture in postwar societies that featured Keynesian economic policies and welfare provision. The allure of a mythic welfare state has boosted John Maynard Keynes's popularity to many who embrace certain facets of socialism. Many critical social scientists have embraced Keynesianism in ways that overlook how the US used Keynesian policies to reengineer and redeploy state power. Keynes's liberal synthesis inspired managers in the US Treasury Department to understand depression-era problems of unemployment and poverty in ways that were consonant with the expansion of corporate power. For understanding Keynesianism, as it actually existed during the Cold War, we must analyse how the US Treasury and State Departments used Keynesian principles to rebuild the social reproductive capacities necessary for capitalist accumulation both domestically and in Western Europe. I focus on how the architects of postwar capitalism used full employment policies, labour laws and welfare provision to renovate the nexus of political practices and institutional structures in ways that formed a benevolent and caring image of 'the state' and the myth of a class compromise. Through these reforms, governmental planners and administrators used the 'state idea' to reorganize capital accumulation as if the postwar economy would represent ordinary people's best interests. In the process, these sophisticated practices of power became reified as the 'welfare state' and the 'Keynesian compromise' in ways that endow these institutions and policies with a character divorced from practices of

Review of International Studies, 2020

While the last few decades of political economic history give the impression that the logic of neoliberalism is inexorable, this article argues that once we look further backwards and dig into recently declassified archives documenting the early days of neoliberal theory and practice, we find a messier picture. Economic policymakers in Thatcher and Reagan's administrations in the early 1980s did not set out to 'fail forwards' by generating a crisis that would enable a statist kind of neoliberalism. The key ideas that they drew on and the policies that they used to put them into practice sought to transform the economy indirectly, through a set of performative policy devices that they believed would generate a dramatic shift in people's inflationary expectations, lowering inflation without provoking a major recession. Archival records make it clear that these efforts were not only a failure, but also one that policymakers were acutely aware of at the time. By examining these quiet failures in economic policy, we can better understand how these governments simultaneously failed in their early efforts to introduce neoliberal economics and yet ultimately succeeded in transforming their economies in important respects-and in legit-imising those transformations by narrating failure as a kind of inevitable success. Introduction The obituaries for Paul Volcker, chairman of the United States' Federal Reserve between 1979 and 1987, who died in December of last year, have been powerful and even moving-yet in one important respect they have almost all been misleading in defining his legacy. The New York Times obituary neatly demonstrates this contradiction: it notes correctly that Volcker's fierce advocacy for central bank independence has had a lasting impact to this day, and also points out how committed, even relentless, he was in seeking to tame inflation by applying a kind of shock therapy to the American economy that produced painful interest rates over 20 per cent in the early 1980s. Yet while the obituary notes that Volcker's initial declaration of 'war on inflation' involved shifting to monetarism, it never mentions that this strategy was a failure and was ultimately dropped in 1982, well before inflation began to shift decisively downwards. Instead, the Times glosses over this failure, and in doing so reinforces a widespread narrative that sees economic policy in the early 1980s under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher as a decisive and successful shift away from 'the postwar era' and towards a new, neoliberal approach to monetary and fiscal policy. 1

International Studies in Sociology of Education, 2013

Neoliberalism is the dominant economic paradigm in the globe today. It has led to stagnant wages, high unemployment, increased income inequality and a decline in quality of life for the average citizen in the industrialised world over the past 30 years. It has also fomented a dramatic increase in economic instability, culminating in the 2007 financial crisis. In this article, I argue for Neo-Keynesian economic policy, including reregulation of the financial sector, a more progressive tax system and strategic government investment in the economy. Looking at education, I conclude that economic reform is a necessary corollary to educational reform if we are to improve the prospects of the next generation.

The aim of this paper is to recount the ebbs and flows of Keynesianism over the history of macroeconomics. The bulk of the paper consists of a discussion of the main episodes of the unfolding of macroeconomics (Keynesian macroeconomics, monetarism, new classical macroeconomics, real business cycle models and new neoclassical synthesis models) against the background of a distinction between Keynesianism as a 'moderately conservative' (Keynes's words) vision about the working of the market system and Keyneisanism as a conceptual apparatus. Particular attention is given to the contrast between Keynesian and Lucasian macroeconomics. The paper ends with a few remarks about the impact of the present crisis on the development of macroeconomic theory.

Global Society, 2018

This article addresses the prospects of a "return to Keynes" in terms of Keynes's own philosophy. It shows that Keynes's moral and political philosophy provide little guide to how Keynesian economics might now be achieved. Keynes's gradualist reformism, derived from both Burke and Moore, leaves a gulf between his economic agenda and the means of its implementation, which is widened in attempts to transpose his proposals onto the global political economy of the 21st century. Keynes's faith in elite intuition and enlightened rule are never securely established and are undermined by his own insights into uncertainty. However, the priority of the short-run and Keynes's depictions of organic unity suggest potential if underdeveloped avenues for alternative social choices and policy redirection .

2023

2. Living in the Springtime of Conscious Revolt: Scholarship on the social history of Keynesianism 'There is a vast gulf between how people who do have incomes lose touch with how people who don't have incomes get through on a daily basis […] One of the consequences of losing touch with class is we've also lost touch with economic analysis.'-Humphrey McQueen, "A Class Balancing Act" (1999) This chapter asks, cui bono? As was shown in Chapter One, the principal beneficiaries of the economic change were the capitalists. Using secondary sources, the enquiry now moves to consider other beneficiaries of Keynesianism. What is offered is a collation of scholarship that establishes the existence of a consensus historical perspective, one that has been hidden until now. Based on the literature amassed, historians and scholars generally see Keynesian economics and the Keynesian reconstruction in particular with ambivalence. While Keynesianism was beneficial to a large section of the population, especially blue-collar and white-collar workers, there were important groups of people who did not benefit as much or at all or were in fact disadvantaged. The significance of this is that the scholarship unwittingly coheres with the view of Keynesianism set out in Chapter One-that Keynesianism arose within capitalism-and reveals the extent to which other views are unsubstantiated, even without the introduction of a social history specifically concerned with Keynesianism. The chapter is arranged thematically. Reconstruction is discussed before the war because of its historiographical significance. Then follows a consideration of certain groups: trade unions, women, Indigenous peoples, the elderly, children and postwar migrants. It ends with a geographical juxtaposition between the experiences of the cities and the countryside, between Australia and those within the Empire who were footing the bill. The chapter is by no means Chapter Two-Living in the Springtime of Conscious Revolt 2 exhaustive, as the amount of scholarship touching on Keynesianism-knowingly or unknowingly-is insurmountable. Reconstruction Keynesianism There are only a small number of scholars who have considered the social history of Keynesianism. John Murphy in his article "Work in the Time of Plenty" (2005) uses oral history of men who experienced full employment in the mid-1950s. 1 Tom Sheridan's extensive work on the labour history of the war and postwar is similarly aimed at the economics. 2 Sheridan's Division of Labour (1989) demonstrates how industrial relations quickly deteriorated at the end of the war; something that occurred in part because of limited involvement of unions in postwar reconstruction planning. This contradicts one of the earliest accounts of reconstruction. 3 Sheridan also provides an example in the experiences of workers in the stevedoring industry, with its largely casual workforce pitted against increasingly bullish and experimental corporations. 4 By rectifying the general employment environment, Keynesianism exposed other hardships. Janet McCalman writes of full employment: Now with full employment, the causes of poverty that would endure for the next four decades were brought out in sharp relief: old age, infirmity, the loss of a male breadwinner and low wages with too many dependents. The rôle of the casual labour economy was quickly fading in working-class life. 5