Excerpt From
In the Long Run We Are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy, and Revolution
Geoff Mann, e-book edition, 2017
From the Preface:
Keynes’s particular diagnosis and consequent prescription were a product of their historical moment in the development of liberal capitalism.
The anxiety and hope beating at the heart of Keynes’s ideas is endemic to capitalist modernity in this sense, and it becomes especially visible in moments of crisis.
What we call Keynesianism is as old as liberal capitalism, and as long as it is the hegemonic mode of social and political economic organization, as it remains in much of the world, Keynesian politics and political economy will find themselves empowered when they are deemed most desperately necessary. In this sense, Keynes and Keynesianism were not “resurrected” following the financial meltdown of 2007–2008, because neither was ever “dead,” however hard some mainstream economists might have tried to convince us otherwise. Capitalist modernity, in fact, is and always has been Keynesian on the inside, as it were—the call for the state when disorder looms or revolution threatens has always been an option, one that, like a panic button, is essential even when we never use it. Indeed, political economy is—or at least I try to show that it is—Keynesian by definition: when the social order is fraying, it is the art and science of revolution without revolutionaries. Revolution is its raison d’être; “born in the wake of the French Revolution, the ghost of Robespierre forever stalks it.
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From chapter 1
Keynesian ideas have been an essential component of political life in capitalist liberal democracy since long before Keynes himself walked the earth.
Keynesianism has been the “default economic creed” of “progressives” at least since 18 Brumaire, year VIII (more familiar to us as November 9, 1799), when Napoleon dissolved the Directory, effectively putting an end to a tumultuous decade of revolution and reaction.
“It [this book] reexamines the force of the Keynesian critique of capitalism and its relation to political economy as both knowledge and a way of knowing. It argues that the Keynesian critique—always constructed in light of a historical, pragmatic, and intuitive Reason—is a distinctively post-revolutionary political economy, assembled and reassembled again and again to address an existential anxiety at the heart of liberal modernity. Like all things social, it has taken a variety of forms, each of which reflect the world in which it seemed necessary. Yet it is always, at its core, a reluctantly radical but immanent critique of liberalism, a science and sensibility that allows us to name “the crisis”—poverty, unemployment, inequality—when everything hangs in the balance and “something must be done.” For Keynesians, from Hegel to Piketty, it is always ultimately civilization itself that is at stake.
In other words, to say that Keynesianism is distinctively postrevolutionary is not to say that “we” (whoever that might be) are past the time of revolution. Rather it is to say that whatever the fate of future revolutions, Keynesianism is a critique of liberal modernity that could only be formulated after revolution. It would never have emerged without a revolutionary past to endlessly haunt it. As a result, the same forces that have animated two centuries of the immanent “reform” of liberalism have also animated much—although certainly not all—of the nominally radical critique of liberalism in what we now call the global North.
Taken at face value, this contribution justifies the truism that Keynes was no radical. As Eric Hobsbawm famously remarked, he came to save capitalism from itself. But to leave it at that is to miss the most important point. The crucial question is not merely what Keynes was trying to save—and the term “capitalism” does not adequately capture the object of his rescue efforts—but why he came to save it and what he came to save it from. Keynes himself was unequivocal on the matter: “Civilization,” he said in 1938, “is a thin and precarious crust, erected by the personality and will of a very few, and only maintained by rules and conventions skillfully put across and guilefully preserved.” This is the single most important premise of all things Keynesian. If it were possible to define the fundamental Keynesianism proposition in a phrase, this is about as close as we could get.
Keynesians also share this obsession, most evident in the emphasis on techno-bureaucratic solutions, which demand that regulatory authorities enjoy as much jurisdictional definition and independence as possible. All varieties of Keynesianism propose what Hegel called a “universal class” that can surgically remove social questions like poverty from the everyday messiness of politics and address them properly in the expert realm of reason and reasonableness.
One of the most fundamental elements of Keynesianism’s immanent critique of liberalism is its apostasy concerning the doctrine of separation. On the contrary, Keynesianism endorses a very Machiavellian position on this front. Keynesians certainly understand the separation between politics and economy as essential to social order, but they are under no impression it is “natural” or a given.
Capitalist modernity’s internal dynamics erode the very social fabric upon which it relies. The grandiose Utopia that Keynes sometimes proposes, like the virtuous full-employment “communism of capital” he envisions at the close of The General Theory, might occasionally give his futurology a rosy glow. But none of his professed hopes or predictions have prevented his sharpest readers from arguing that his analysis of modern political economy is “pessimistic.” I would go further: it is tragic.
He [Keynes] knew the traditional bourgeois rationalizations—that poverty is “natural” or “good” for the poor because it motivates them; that government requires a core of elites with a disproportionate stake in the maintenance of social order; or that inequality ensures that the wealthy can play their part as savers (what Schumpeter called “the last pillar of the bourgeois argument”)—were nothing but lies. To force people to be poor is not only morally indefensible—a moral failure classical and neoclassical theories dismiss by blaming the poor for their poverty—but also foolish.
The slump [of 1929] , he promised, was merely a bump in the road on the way to abundance,
only a temporary phase of maladjustment. All this means in the long run that mankind is solving the economic problem. I would predict that the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is to-day … This means that the economic problem is not—if we look to the future—the permanent problem of the human race.
Seven years later, the world was a much bleaker place. Stuck in economic depression, with fascism on the rise and bread lines across the “progressive countries,” the slump no longer seemed a merely “temporary phase of maladjustment.”
The two propositions—that “economic bliss” is on the horizon, but “the best we can do is put off disaster”—describe the dialectic of hope and fear at the heart of Keynesianism. They coexist, commingle; in fact, they are essentially simultaneous “glass-half-full” and “glass-half-empty” views of the very same Keynesian glass.
Keynesianism always combines an extraordinary optimism concerning the quasi-Utopian potential of human communities and human ingenuity with an existential terror at the prospect that it might not be realized. There is a sense in which, for Keynesians, liberal capitalism is always at a historical tipping point or precipice on which we balance in an inherently unstable “normality.”
The real threat to prosperity, the political purpose of the Keynesian project, lay in the second “thing”: avoiding “wars and civil dissension.” In the conditions in which it was formulated, Keynes’s political economy—and all varieties of Keynesianism—are about the production of credible stability in the face of crisis. The problem is not so much the “radical uncertainty” that features prominently in Keynes’s thought, but the constant threat that radical uncertainty will precipitate a collapse of the social order. In other words, the fear is not that capitalism’s contradictions produce the conditions for its own supersession in the radical sense.
Keynes might, I suppose, have been “a clear-sighted, intelligent conservative preparing to fight what he knows is coming,” but it was not for the revolutionary realization of proletarian justice that he was preparing himself. He knew those dreams were out there among fractions of the masses, and he even granted their legitimacy in a way. But he was absolutely convinced they would remain unfulfilled. Like most liberals, Keynes did not believe the masses could achieve anything constructive on their own, let alone something so sophisticated as a new social order. They were, despite their aspirations perhaps, only capable of destruction.
The General Theory. That work, and virtually all those concepts and policies we call Keynesian, are essentially moments in a political economy of anxiety and hope—efforts to subdue the sources of social disorder and animate the untapped social and economic wealth immanent to what Keynes called “modern communities.
Even if we are willing to believe he was dead prior to 2008, the anxiety that resurrected Keynes at that point has not subsided one bit. Indeed, while unevenly distributed, it has produced capitalism’s most significant legitimation crisis since the interwar years and has sowed the seeds for a political volatility the state and elites are addressing with what can only be described as regulatory and technocratic panic.
It is, or at least one could be forgiven for thinking it is, a somewhat paradoxical world, one in which, as Piketty puts it, “capital is back,” just as capitalism itself seems to have stalled. By every measure, it is increasingly unequal, increasingly undemocratic, and “it seems, increasingly precarious. It is plagued with political and economic fragmentation and volatility, decades of geopolitical order seem to be coming unstuck, rising ethno-nationalist populisms trouble formerly dependable liberalisms in the core, and all this is unraveling against a background of accelerating global climate change and ecological degradation.
Far more than the renewed interest in Keynesian economics, or Keynes the economist or statesman, it is the precariousness of “civilization” that makes the question of Keynesianism urgent. We are witness to the desperate refusal to abandon the belief that a non-revolutionary bliss is out there to be realized, that “something will turn up.” This anxious hope and trepidation are not confined to elites, governors, or the ruling class, and they exceed the realm of liberal politics. They are, rather, widespread across otherwise quite rigid lines of difference—millions of us have become, as Keynes was once described, “Geiger counters of future headlines.”
While a burgeoning radicalism appears to have more to offer than at any time since the 1960s, so too, it seems, does a hateful nationalist-racist populism. Fundamentalist religious authoritarianism and xenophobic and reactionary far-right movements—protofascisms and worse—seem to be exploding, and the vindictive austerity-capitalism that one would think was the root of the problem seems to have survived the financial crisis many thought would kill it.
The likely liberal response to these new planetary challenges has the potential to further concentrate power and resources in the hands of elites, a condition more than likely to render progressives even more beholden to a political status quo that might seem the only thing between us and political chaos.
A justifiable skepticism regarding the capacity of representative democracy, however radical, to lead us out of the woods, a fear of the seemingly inevitable violence that will follow, and a turn to the centralizing state as the only answer—have always partly defined the condition and critique I call Keynesianism. In other words, this situation is not merely the result of the recent and broad-based recognition of looming environmental catastrophe or accelerating inequality and mass displacement. It is much older than that. It follows not from our novel historical or geographical context, but instead from a logic fundamental to the very notion of politics in liberal capitalism—for most of its critics and its proponents—for at least two centuries: a distrust of the masses.
Attempts by left intellectuals like Thomas Frank to frame the problem as merely the product of manufactured reactionary populism rather than as a fundamental part of liberal democracy—which, in its “true” form is instead posited as an incorruptible goodness machine—are just obfuscations.
Much (if not all) of the Left wants democracy without populism; it wants transformational politics without the risks of transformation; it wants revolution without revolutionaries. This is the legacy of the Terror and Stalinism, and it is the logic at the heart of Keynesianism. Much of the self-described Left is not as far as we would like to think from the Keynes who declared that if it came down to it, he would side with the bourgeoisie.
Contemporary liberalism in the capitalist global North is constituted, more than anything else, by an effort to ensure that capital does not alienate a large enough proportion of the people to destabilize the social order, thus putting its historical achievements at risk and precipitating what Keynes’s avatar Piketty calls the “Marxian apocalypse.”
Against anything deserving the name Marxism, liberals believe that a scientific assessment of their power will give them the tools to hold on to it forever.
As Keynes’s theory of civilization makes clear, because the bourgeoisie cannot imagine a nonbourgeois society, it cannot conceive of its own end as anything other than the end of the world. The specter behind its fear, therefore, is neither the multitude, nor the 99 percent as the-truth-of-the-working-class, nor the-people-as-historically-“autonomous” force striving to overthrow the existing order to free itself or take power. Rather, the multitude or the 99 percent represents the potential destruction of the social stability that keeps disorder at bay.
Rather than welcoming the meltdown (as, say, Marx did the financial turmoil of 1857), radical political economists like Robin Blackburn, Robert Wade, and others have been mostly interested in stabilizing a system so that unrest does not destroy the whole kit and caboodle, thus ruining the lives not only of the rich who nevertheless deserve it, but of as many or more of the innocent poor. Their proposals are more or less unqualified attempts to save the institutions of capitalism while dethroning capital. There is much worth considering in that idea, but whether it is possible—especially in the face of environmental catastrophe—is a key question, and the answer is not at all clear.
The historical logic upon which Marx made his wager offered a guarantee. That guarantee is not a function of his supposed belief that “historical necessity” was equivalent to inevitability. Contrary to a century and a half of misreading, he did not believe that at all. He knew history does not just happen, it has to be made. Instead, the Marxian wager—the salto mortale—was based on the guarantee that however long it might take, unrelenting struggle will eventually be rewarded.
Whatever radical wagers we choose to make in the face of capitalism, liberalism, and their occasional fascist and totalitarian guises, there is a very real possibility that we make them in vain. There is no certain victory, even in the longest run or the latest instance—or if there is, it is presently unimaginable. No matter how long and hard the path, it may still end in disaster. This only seems to make Keynesianism more sensible than ever.
As Georges Sorel put it in 1919, excoriating Keynesianism before Keynes: “Our middle class desire to die in peace—after them the deluge.”
I believe that we cannot grasp a way out of our current, and eminently rational, road to ruin without understanding Keynesianism, what it offers, and what it forecloses. Contemporary capitalism and liberalism are literally unimaginable without it, and, as a result, so too are any feasible plans to escape the binds in which they tie us.
Geoff Mann’s In the Long Run We Are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy, and Revolution, Verso 2017, e-copy, pp. 22-49
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