Tuesday 18 February 2014

Ingo Stützle: Keynesianism is not Necessarily Leftist

Source: marxismocritico.com

"The class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie" (J.M. Keynes, "The end of laissez-faire").

Ingo Stützle (political scientist and Fellow at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, Germany) interviewed on austerity as a political project: link.

You may disagree with some or even with many things in Stützle's article. I do. For example, I find his evaluation of Keynesian policies is unfair: you cannot say something failed, when it was hardly applied.

Be that as it may; here he hit the nail squarely:
"It [i.e. Keynesianism] is not necessarily leftist, since Keynesian policies do not aim at transcending capitalist forms. A good life is only possible when capitalism has become a chapter in history books."
Ignore that warning at your own peril.
"For another thing, Keynesian policies aren’t able to assert themselves because they appear to be more reasonable – that’s a bourgeois conception of social change. Which policies are able to finally assert themselves is the result of economic conditions, but also of social struggles."

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Sadly, J.M. "Pozzo" kicked the bucket long ago. I'd have loved finding him in a trench of the class war.

UPDATE:
11-01-2016. Edited the last bit, to make it more explicit.

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