Keynes Hate Thread

But he's not wrong; the same cannot be said about Shaik.

I'm not gonna sit here and defend Keynes too hard as he saved capitalism and was basically anti communist, but to paint him as some psycho who wanted to make the working class suffer is pretty unfair, and totally ignorant of the culture he existed in.
Do you think appealing to the better nature of Churchill - who had striking miners shot - would make the slightest bit of difference?
So obviously all his arguments had to be couched in pro capitalist terms, the British Treasury did not give a shit about anything else, and even then they were hesitant as they wanted to maintain their bullshit class and aristocratic system that they love over there.

You could at least spell his name correctly, you dickhead.

...

Okay so you're basically extrapolating and inferring all sorts of nefarious motives to Keynes for some reason. I'm surprised you haven't brought up the pyramids argument yet.
He was an economist - and a damn good one - but that doesn't mean he should be sanctified or demonised.

As for the whole he was just an economist meme, I suppose that's partially true but the problem is this–he was wrong.

Most honest observers admit that the 1970s showed that something was inherently wrong with Keynesianism and the explosion of gold prices during the 2008 recession would seem to be just further confirmation of that fact.

I really didn't expect this much resistance regarding Keynes on a rad left board. It's time to face the facts, Marxism and Keynesianism are fundamentally incompatible doctrines. And, unfortunately for Keynesians, Marx explains capitalism a great deal better then Keynes or his followers have.

The alternative to these cutbacks is unemployment, theoretically. What would you rather, a 10% pay cut or a 100% pay cut and the punitive requirements of time-limited dole? Or indeed, the workhouse?
it matters a lot. giving money to those who won't spend it in a way that boosts aggregate demand is a total waste of time.
and since the poor have a greater tendency to spend their dosh :^)
Dangerous alternative theory: It's because WW2 helped to wipe out the overhanging debts from the great depression, thereby allowing economic growth to be restored. Around 1965 private debt passed 100% of GDP again, leading to all sorts of shit effects.

Keynes set up a useful theoretical basis to work from in managing capitalism (Well, arguably Kalecki did basically the same thing without the overhang of being a rich Englishman.) and for that is good.

pic
Because the problem was a supply shock, not a demand shock. (Alongside - I'm incredibly convinced now, inappropriate control of banking and currency.)

Are you from Holla Forums? Your obsession with superficiality and personality seems like you'd be from there.

Pretty much everything you posted is complete shit tbqh, either misrepresented or simply factually wrong.

Why not choose both :^) t. 1970s and beyond

Let's be real fam, Keynes ideas here are fallacious, unemployment doesn't happen because workers demand too much but rather because of overproduction of commodities in relation to the hard-limits created by the money commodity.

Sure, but government spending on say bridges or the military would work just as well. Why you would advocate for cutting wages via inflation while subsidizing workers via the state seems a little contradictory and self-defeating tbh

The removal of the gold standard (aka the barbarous relic) should allow the money supply and capitalism to expand without limit. Why worry about the effects of giving trillions to bankers either outright or through artificially low interest rates when pure fiat currency essentially allows you to call money into existence without limit? It maybe said that neoliberalism is a very conservative interpretation of Keynesianism but I see it as a valid interpretation of Keynesianism nonetheless.

I've never denied that it is a useful tool for managing capitalism but I believe the cost the working class has paid for this tool of capitalist management has been higher then the Left usually appreciates. Now, it would seem that it carries both high costs to the working class and its efficacy for maintaining capitalism is in-doubt.

I was mainly talking about the burger experience with Keynesian policies. During the inflation that came with Vietnam in the late 60s and the sudden outbreak of massive inflation in the 70s the Keynesian economists begged unions not to go on strike in order to keep them from making things worse. The unions largely complied with these demands and unsurprisingly they became more and more irrelevant as time went on.

Nice to know there's a fairly close British parallel tho

When you reduce production, employment is going to fall as less workers are required to produce the lower quantity of goods. So we're back to square one.
It's not so much that workers demand too much (which implies upward pressure) so much as the wage-cost the employer can handle drops too far. Workers can make no claim for a wage increase at all and still find their employer can't afford them. If all employers are a similar situation and fire those they believe to be superfluous, we're all fucked.
Because you cut wages to keep workers in the jobs they're already in, then to deal with the continued shortfall employ the rest. There are two crises to contend with: Unprofitability and unemployment, and the two are interlinked. The key is to stop the two spiralling together. A 10% pay cut is almost invariably better than even what the dole would offer one today.

Though the intent of inflationary policy is much, much broader than just lowering real-terms wages when necessary. Deflation is unspeakably shit. We have essentially constant inflation and we're in a private debt crisis, godforbid the consequences of increasing the real-terms value of debts. (And even now, I mean, it's not so much the real terms wages thing as managing expectations. Neoclassicals don't really like the idea that people think outside real-terms.)

I mean, if you weight things both inflation and unemployment were far better in the US than in the UK.
Now, that could be the underlying relative weakness of the UK economy - and it could also be the insanities of the heath government's change to financial regulation that lead to the 30% inflation peak - and of course there are differences in measuring standards, But as an example the point still broadly remains. (Perhaps a stronger example would be the Australian transition to neoliberalism, where the Hawke government was much closer to the unions than usual during that time - and again, the transition was less painful even if the end result was still hell.)

What's the deal with so many trendy "left" student wankers pretending to have read this or that theorist? And then they skim over secondary literature to make up for that. Problem is: Those writers tried to pull the same shit.

>I've never seen Keynes fanboys bring up the fact that Keynes upbraided the British capitalists for wage-cutting and giving superfluous workers the sack, not because of the human damage it caused, but because even these measures failed to stop the improvement of the working class standard of living due to the deflation of the Depression making the real wages of British workers worth more in spite of the cut-backs. Indeed, for Keynes what should have happened is that the capitalists should've refrained from wage cut-backs while the state issues money at a rate to bring about inflation that would diminish the real wages of the working class.
They never bring up that "fact" because Keynes never actually proposed that. It is a meme older than the internet spread by right-wing think tanks, and idiots like you keep the lie alive. What Keynes actually did was that early in the General Theory he brought up people caring more about nominally losing income by changes in a contract than about losing income due to mild inflation. He brought that up as a simple illustration of the non-neutrality of money, you twat, and not as a policy proposal. Start reading a cunting book anytime, you cunty cunt.

how much are you being paid to be here?

Bumb for interesting convo

Well, at least you're honest that this is the Keynesian position, unlike certain 🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧shills🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧 in this thread.

Also, I would point out that even for a reformist its not as if the dole and/or wage cuts designed to "save jobs" are the only choices. In burgerland, before the Keynesian mind-melt, the government chose to employ workers via government programs that helped create world-class infrastructure that future capitalists and governments would piggy-back off of.

It didn't stop the Depression but then again, nothing could do that except time and/or a great stimulatory event like WWII but it was a solution to mass unemployment.

The jury is out on whether the monetary stimulation and QE favored in the aftermath of 2008 was even an effective strategy of crisis management. Ten years of high-unemployment in the rich world and statements from the BofE admitting the effect of the recession on income was similar to that of a world war makes me think it wont be viewed positively by future economists and historians.

As for the 70s, Williams does a good write up of why Keynesian monetary policy was rejected in 1979 and why the ruling class could not accept it without incurring immense economic problems.
critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com/2009/10/04/from-the-1974-75-recession-to-the-volcker-shock/https://critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com/three-books-on-marxist-political-economy/three-books-on-marxist-political-economy-pt-9/

>But what the Keynesians and profit-squeeze/rop theorists both get wrong is that the primary limit to capitalist expansion isn't a failure of demand, falling profits, and/or overinvestment. The primary barrier to capitalist expansion is the overproduction of commodities against the supply of the money commodity (Gold).
ctrl+f gold: 9 results ITT so far.
>critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com
ctrl+f gold: 15 matches
This thread has AIDS and your blog is AIDS.

Not an argument and I wish it was my blog.

Posting things that are untrue is also not an argument, yet that's all you've done. Please fuck off.

Why don't you fuck off capitalist apologist?

fuck off kid

Which works of Marx and Keynes have you read? The author of the blog misrepresents Keynes, see: And the author also peddles some gold-money theory, even though we have been off the gold standard for decades. (Inb4 but muh Marx wrote about gold-backed currency). What sort of argument about this Ron-Paul-from-the-left nonsense do you want to have? Do you agree with the author's "theory" about the overproduction of commodities against the supply of the money commodity? It is you who is not making an argument, it's just a series of assertions that at glance look completely bananas. Feel free to make an actual argument and give reasons for these claims that are rather counter-intuitive, to say that in a nice way.

And, yet, despite the formal demonetization of gold it has continued to serve as a safe-haven for capitalists in the form of a money commodity. During the 70s after dumping the gold standard, capitalists bought into gold like crazy trading dollars and other currencies for gold in the face of the economic turmoil of that decade.

This is reflected in the fact that in 1967, before the collapse of the London Gold Pool, the dollar-price of gold was $35 but by January 1980 it had hit $850 an ounce.

How did the policy-makers in the US government respond to this problem? They did not take up the Keynesian prescription of expanding the money-supply which would've drove up the dollar-price of gold even further but fixed it the same way the much-maligned central bankers of the 19th and early 20th centuries had done so in the past–they increased the interest rate, to an unprecedented 20%.

At the point the same old behavior that capitalists exhibited under the formal gold standard manifested itself, hoarders of gold bullion or gold-backed credit money under the old system began to trade their gold back in order to get in on the lure of the potential profits that high-interest rates offered. The policy worked even if made the economy scream and hurt average borrowers, by the end of 1981 the dollar price was down to $381 dollars an ounce.

It should also be noted that even Anwar Shaikh has noted that when commodity prices are measured in gold-terms they exhibit the deflationary behavior that Marx described in his time. That's obvious enough, the post-1960s industrialized world has experienced near-constant inflation while the price of gold has had a tendency to explode during crises while only really coming down after economic stabilization and boom periods. The US dollar has never returned to anything close to its Bretton Woods against gold and so we'd have to conclude that an ounce of gold today will buy far more commodities then it would in 1967.

35 dollars in 1967 would purchase about $256.51 worth of commodities, whereas an ounce of gold today is worth about $1,288 dollars. You'll notice that strictly speaking that 35 dollars in 1967 and an ounce of gold today are the same thing, the same measurement and embodiment of exchange value, so how can this discrepancy exist? Bourgeois inflation indexes are based on the nominal prices paid for commodity baskets, particularly CPI. So, due to the devaluation of the currency and effects of inflation the nominal value of the prices paid for commodities have risen by a fairly large amount, but the same commodities in gold-terms have actually fallen in value by five times! It's unavoidable then that someone in the 60s would receive a smaller basket of commodities for their credit money worth an ounce a gold then someone today would get for the money they exchanged for an ounce of gold.

Another point that Williams reemphasis of the original Marxist theory of money explains is not only why capitalists watch the price of gold to an extent that would indicate that it isn't merely just another commodity but why in fact central banks and the most powerful economies in the world are also the largest holders and hoarders of gold.

This is indeed a puzzle since the Keynesians had allegedly tossed King Gold from his throne and made him into merely another citizen, just another humble commodity. But what use would Central Banks have for gold then if it is merely another commodity? A gold hoard in the national banks makes about as much sense as keeping an oil reserve beneath the treasury or renting out its empty rooms for retail storage as a side-business.

It would be much smarter to dump the gold from the reserves onto the market if gold no longer has any kind of relevance to the fiat token money system that currently exists. The gold exists, as collateral, as everyone knows, but why would any kind of collateral be needed if a money commodity is not needed, and if a pure fiat currency can exist under capitalism? And why use gold as collateral, if it is indeed not money and merely just another commodity.

As of 2016, the US treasury was the largest holder of gold in the world, the US gold-stock was nearly as large as the next three largest countries combined; which may explain the strange resilience of the dollar in an era of declining American power.

Put simply, this theory explains many things that Keynesianism is at a loss to explain. Keynesianism and bastardizations of Marxism that attempt to combine Keynesianism and other neoclassical theories can only arrive at some variation of Says Law, they lose track of the fundamental contradiction between use-value and exchange-value.
forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2016/05/26/top-10-countries-with-the-largest-gold-reserves/2/#3927781422db
isreview.org/issue/63/return-keynes

The problem was inflation, not a high gold price.
Also, they weren't Keynesians they were Friedmanite Monetarists. By raising interest rates they wanted to constrain growth of the money supply, which would resolve the problem of "too much money chasing too few goods"

I was a long time Keynesian and have never heard him credited with the welfare state, just deficit spending.
I'm not sure why you're so mad at Keynes, he's practically dead, everyone practices neo liberalism now.

Akshully:
>In the first instance, these conclusions may have been applied to the kind of economy in which we actually live by false analogy from some kind of non-exchange Robinson Crusoe economy, in which the income which individuals consume or retain as a result of their productive activity is, actually and exclusively, the output in specie of that activity. But, apart from this, the conclusion that the costs of output are always covered in the aggregate by the sale-proceeds resulting from demand, has great plausibility, because it is difficult to distinguish it from another, similar-looking proposition which is indubitable, namely that income derived in the aggregate by all the elements in the community concerned in a productive activity necessarily has a value exactly equal to the value of the output.
marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/general-theory/ch02.htm
Is there even a single idea in economics you are actually familiar with?

What caused the runaway inflation of the 70s? One might think that the world's reserve currency going off the gold standard would allow Keynesians the lee-way to manage the economy as they saw fit, no longer would they be straight-jacketed by the fetters of the gold standard.

Can you really not see any relationship between runaway inflation and the fact that going off the gold standard caused capitalists to think "hmmmm these dollars aren't worth nearly as much as we thought they were" resulting in a major devaluation in the currency? Of course things would end up costing more, the money just didn't nearly have the same value that it did previously. The refusal of Keynesian policymakers to put the break on either interest rates or the money-supply failed to kick the economy back into gear and likely made the inflation much worse.

Was there also no relation to the fact of high-inflation rates and the fact that capitalists were increasingly buying up gold as insurance against it? Did it perhaps contribute to the dollar's decline that capitalists either took their dollars out of circulation and/or liquidated their dollar holdings and exchanged them for gold? Once sellers/producers of gold released their dollars back into the economy it must've been a quite curious thing that an army of dollar-holders was waiting to exchange their currency for gold at a now even higher price. Could it have transpired that currency speculators and other capitalists observing the behavior of other capitalists fleeing to gold like rats from a sinking ship adjusted their expectations of both what the dollar is worth and could buy?

Why flee to gold if it was "just another commodity"? After all a regular commodity given a high-rate of inflation, even if perfectly preserved, will generally lose its real value as the money used to pay for said commodity in the past was worth more then what it was exchanged for. Under the such conditions it could transpire that a hoarded is sold at a nominal profit but a real loss.

It is almost as if capitalists, knowing gold's universal value, trust it as a store of value and understand that it isn't just any commodity. It becomes more valuable in real-terms in times of non-golden inflation or deflation and it can always be exchanged for something, it is always in demand because a medium of exchange that can hold its value is always necessary. Gold not being in-demand is like the dollar, the yen, the pound, or the yuan etc. not being in-demand in a capitalist society because money is the life-blood of capitalism. A money commodity must always exist under capitalism because labor is necessary at some point to valorize a money commodity. Paper token money takes so little labor-time to produce that it can never fill this role and in addition to that trillions of dollars could be rushed into existence on keyboards electronically without any labor being done, that is why gold, in addition to its other qualities, fills the role of money-commodity when the rubber meets the road.

In the 70s, buying and selling gold was one of the era's most profitable activities and little wonder what could be had for $35 dollars in 1967 could be sold at $850 dollars in 1980. Considering that 35 dollars was equivalent to about 85 dollars in 1980 that's a profit of close to ten times in real terms and over 20 times in nominal terms.

In the first place, Friedman was against the gold standard. In the second place, neoliberal orthodoxy was hardly orthodoxy or an unchallengeable dogma in 1980. And in any case, it can hardly be said that Volcker, the man who was most essential to that transition was a card carrying Hayek-reading Freidman-worshipping neoliberal, he was a democrat, an LSE graduate, who still considers himself to be a progressive of sorts and who has said that the only banking innovation he believes was significant is the ATM. He was also at the heart of Nixon's plan to scrap gold convertibility, something that Keynes himself would have smiled upon instead of rueing the decline of sound money like a Paulbot he claimed it was the most important achievement of his career.

The neoliberal orthodoxy came into fruition when it became common wisdom that Freidman's conservative monetarism was what predicted and later stopped the 70s crisis. Even though both Keynes and Friedman had fairly polar viewpoints they both disagreed with the gold standard but its almost like neither Friedman's conservative, nor Mr. Keynes policies have really worked when it came to resolving the contradictions of capitalism. Weird.

Not fucking gold. Even standard macroeconomists have a better explanation than that: investopedia.com/articles/economics/09/1970s-great-inflation.asp

Even lolbergs don't fetishise gold this much.

So? Gold is essentially irrelevant here. The worst that leaving the pseudo-gold standard did was smash the fixed exchange rate system, creating instability. Gold itself is a meme.
It may not have been unchallengeable. It was, however, government policy. (And even in the 1970s the bank of England - always a bellweather - came out as monetarist.) Limiting expansion of the money supply was the intent of high interest rates, not bringing capitalists back from their investment in gold.
Keynes still wanted managed and stable exchange rates. (See: Bancor, which also had an arbitrary gold element but was essentially just politically managed convertibility without US powerbroking.)

lol

Wow, its almost like it supports exactly what I'm saying. You might say there was a golden inflation in the 60s that came from the fact that the US economy was booming and near-full employment, fighting a massive war and maintaining an extremely large mil-industrial complex (10% of GDP) and gov spending on infrastructure, social projects and social programs etc. I use the word "might" because it soon became apparent that America didn't have the reserves necessary to pay its bills, that it was essentially bankrupt and writing checks it couldn't cash…

To get out of obligations to foreign capitalists particularly in Europe, Japan, and the Middle East, the US decided to suspend gold convertibility which had already been more or less suspended for citizens. This was good for the US government because its foreign creditors could be paid with paper hot off the printing press and the resulting inflation would diminish the real value of its debt burden anyways.It came back to bite them but the dollar position of world reserve currency allowed them to export some of their inflation to the rest of the world.

The US could have admitted its bankruptcy in 1968 and either followed through with a foreign debt cancellation or it could have raised up its gold reserves by raising interest rates as was common in the past. Instead it took a Keynesian approach to crisis-management that probably worked better to preserve the US empire, but this time the crisis took the form of high-inflation instead of the deflation typical of most classic recessions.

The problem is that a high dollar price of gold was a bellwether for the dollar's devaluation and not that capitalists were making money off gold. Theoretically, they should have just expanded the money supply and gold would simply act as any other commodity in that situation. But instead gold went up and up with every new expansion of the money supply. It acted as if it was, ya know, money and one might go far to say it acted as if it was the currency that all other currencies measure
themselves against.

The question is what is there to celebrate or worth emulating about the policy? It's true they "beat" deflation but only by inflating it away with great implications for working class standards of living.

You are not familiar with Keynes, OP. In post you say:
Which wasn't his position at all. It is slander spread by right-wingers. The position of Keynes was rather that there isn't enough investment because investors lack confidence, which comes from lack of expecting much demand, a belief which is strongly influenced by lack of current demand, which leads to a self-perpetuating dynamic, because that lack of confidence means there isn't much investment, and so there is high unemployment, and so there is lack of demand, and so on. The counter to that isn't muh gold, but just pointing out that stats don't show demand going down leading to recessions.
In post >>11989244 you say:
Volcker was hardly a gay nigger from outerspace. What of it? I would accuse you of consciously moving goalposts if I had confidence in your actual knowledge about those people. The point made is that neither Friedman nor Volcker were fanboys of Keynes. Your understanding is like that of somebody who started skimming Wikipedia articles last week.

Sorry.

An interesting parallel would be 2007-2008 where the FED sat on its ass during the contraction and refused to expand the money supply. That was based on a conservative interpretation of the events of the 70s that the problem was an oversupply of money against too few goods.

So it seems to me that both Keynesian spendthrift approaches to the management of token currency and the conservative tighten-your-belt approaches have been tried. The problem is that the laws of political economy cannot be brought into being by mere fiat, the most scientific alternative is Marxian monetary theory.

Have you considered teaming up with revolutionary Marxist economist ROOOON PAUL for that?

Fucking hell. This shit with the numbers wouldn't have happened if my computer was made of solid gold. I need stable number values :(

Why not call it a night? You're shitposting way too hard and you've obviously busted a few brain blood vessels in anger. You seem to have forgotten that sage isn't a downvote so you might want to get that checked out.

Right. This is your 1st reasonable post ITT and you won't win over anybody anyway. So have fun talking to yourself.

Where are you from and what is your ideology? I have an inherent skepticism about muh gold but you haven't actually attacked their argument beyond "muh gold", "le ron paul", "conventional wisdom kiddies".

youtu.be/ZOa3EUKOFxw?list=PLB1uqxcCESK6B1juh_wnKoxftZCcqA1go

Holy fucking shit goldbuggerers are retarded, your precious shinys are a drop of spit in an ocean compared to the economy today.

All the gold, silver, and platinum ever mined in the entire world over the whole history of civilization (not just that which you perverts are masturbating on heaps of, also the stuff being used in jewelry and useful industrial applications) is worth baraly 1/3 more than the global economy's cash money (M0). If you instead compare it to that plus bank accounts and other everyday deposits (M2), precious metal holdings sink to a single-digit percentage. Beyond that, it vanishes well below single-digit percentages of the money supply.

The only reason the price of gold is so high is the same as natural diamonds: Con artists exploiting gullible fetishists like you. FDR was right, all the gold should be confiscated from you by force, freeing it up for the electronics industry so we don't have to deal with cheap copper/aluminum garbage.

If we went back to the gold standard the gold price would go up to its new CORRECT value