Just finished reading Keynes; why the fuck do rightists think this guy was a socialist...

Just finished reading Keynes; why the fuck do rightists think this guy was a socialist? He literally asserts Bourgeois intellectual and spiritual supremacy, advocates the crushing of Labour Unions, and the preservation of the free-market.

He also fucking hated Marxism, called it an "illogical and dull" ideology that was based upon "out-of-date controversialising".

I could go on; how he railed against government power, was obsessed with getting businesses to invest, profit-boosting etc., but I think I've said enough.

This guy was literally the equivalent of a modern-day NeoCon.

Keynes is more of a gravedigger to socialism then that brainlet Hayek and related economist.

They don't read.

Calling him a neocon is a bit off, he was definitely in favor of the British formal empire, etc. but I don't think he spent a whole lot of energy calling for militarism. A right winger at heart for sure though, he more or less explicitly set out that his theories were solely intended as a parachute to prevent the rise of radicalism.

Addendum: They have had it drilled into their head for a century by every media outlet and every propaganda arm of the deep state that socialism is to blame for all their problems thus they identify all the shittiness of capitalism and the socdem welfare states they live in as 'socialism'.

I remember I was in a sociology class and the professor asked if anyone was a Keynesian, and I raised my hand (was still a "moderate" liberal at the time) and he laughed at me lol.

Sounds like he's either incredibly shitty or /ourguy/

Keynes' what? All of it? Do you want to explain his treatise on probability?
As can be read on Wikiquote, that is well known. Would you mind giving more details on this bit:
Do you have anything besides the old chestnut about stealthily stealing wages via inflation? Because I know damn well that he didn't advocate for that, it was just used as an example of the non-neutrality of money, which was then misrepresented by right-wing propagandists as the program of Keynes in order to slander him, and that has been mindlessly repeated by some very illogical and dull people on the left.

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sure you did…

What did you actually read? The General Theory? Collected Essays? (This is quite important, since Keynes 1926 is very different to Keynes 1944)
To answer the question:
rightists are stupid. insofar as they read, they read Hayek and continue being stupid. defining socialism as any-and-all government intervention gives a convenient unifying point for the right, even if it's nonsense, since it lets them group basically anyone not "on their side" under one banner.
gonna need a source
oddly unqualified statement. On the one hand, yes, Keynes was not a central planner - but on the other if you look at his response to The Road to Serfdom for example, he writes that the necessary response in the postwar world is not less planning but more.
don't necessarily dispute this but interested in where you got the idea
i mean, he was an economist.

he was also not entirely wrong to call Marxism dull, though consensus in the economic community would appear to be that those who write The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money shouldn't throw stones.

Suck my dick

Brainlets like you should just be banned on sight

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Are you daft?

Because Keynes advocated government whatever and government whatever = GOMMUNISMS

So where did Keynes argue for that?

He doesn't overtly argue for it, I perhaps should've worded things better, but the guy's two primary motivations were to crush the Unions and to maintain the free market.

The General Theory.

As far as I'm concerned he argues that we ought to have an impotent government that would do nothing but, through tax and spending policies, maintain the equilibrium of the free market. That's essentially a right-wing Conservative position.

Oh, and as for the "big government" issue, the only reason he has that reputation is because He was in favor of budget deficits during contraction. This ignores that he was only in favour of deficits under certain conditions, and favoured budget surpluses during boom periods.

Hardly the epitome of a guy who supports "big government", which is what rightists claim.

Does he argue for it at all, does he imply it, can you give citations?

What country are you from? I don't know what a right-wing conservative is to you. In America, economically speaking, it's somebody who just thinks the government is bad. The only things they might like are medicare and social security, and it's because they're often old and receive checks in the mail "THAT I PAID FOR" etc. Younger conservatives will often just be libertarians or something similar that think we should have almost no government, don't even care about social security because they're convinced it will not be able to pay them anyways.

Those are basically beliefs that the government interferes in markets. Keynes thought the government was more than necessary, it was integral to the market functioning at all.

Yeah but the point is he was a capitalist not a socialist and thought his policies would improve capitalism. Keynes was literally part of the elitist intellectual bourgeoisie, he had disdain for the working class. He argued against socialism

they do?
I've read his general theory and it didn't impress me in the slightest
dude just argues that market can be in equilibrium with less than full employment and from here he advocates state intervention to switch economy to another equilibrium state with full employment
plus he shares the general socdem delusion that investment comes before profits

Right. But why pretend to have read the GT in order to tell people here something they already know?

I mean, even this would need some kind of link or proof.


I'd reiterate that there are additional considerations when it comes to "maintaining a free market", since - again - Keynes was quite enthusiastic about planning. The end of Laisse-Faire (1926) is an interesting view on this. In particular, this part of it he touches on how in huge corporations of the day, the interests of management and the enterprise often trumped anything shareholders had to say. In essence, what JK Galbraith would later identify as the "Technostructure" - In large part, the counter-revolution that lead against Keynes was also simultaneously lead against the technostructure, and out towards the Friedmanite belief that the primary duty of a business was to profit it's shareholders.

Continuing to lean on that, I think it gets much closer to a position I'd consider strongly British, where there's neither the Americanised fear of government, nor total enthusiasm. Again, from 1926


In a vague extruding sense, I read that as being at least accepting of state-owned institutions for economic direction, either something like the National Enterprise Board or maybe even a National Investment Bank, and quite possibly if - say - railways were nationalised ("There is, for instance, no so-called important political question so really unimportant, so irrelevant to the reorganisation of the economic life of Great Britain, as the nationalisation of the railways." aside), having them run at arms length as an autonomous body instead of appointing a "minister for the railways" On the quote itself, I'd take notice of the point of it being unimportant or irrelevant - since you can conversely read it that it isn't particularly important to fight the nationalisation of the railways, in a "today they plan the trains, tomorrow they plan the gulag" Hayekian sense.

This is, of course, all pre-General-Theory Keynes.

I don't think anyone really denies that.


are we talking in an economic cycle here, or in terms of what bourgs will prioritise?
part of my impression is that circumstances could arise from social democracy where the bourgs will stop investing for porky reasons and a benevolent government will have to step in and provide key all investment itself.

He was pretty cool, that class made me start thinking more about the world so it turned me into a Marxist, guess the cultural Marxism meme is true

Anybody have any other objections to Keynes's theories aside from he isn't a socialist?

Yeah I don't recall this either.

He hasn't given evidence, I don't think Keynes ever suggested this. To the contrary, he suggested mockingly that labor unions are smarter than classical economists for not accepting reductions in wages, though the classical economists would suggest that their push against wage reductions would create unnecessary unemployment because wages couldn't actually meet the marginal productivity of labor. Basically, wages weren't allowed to drop to a level at which everybody could be employed. Keynes rejected that this was any source of unemployment.

He certainly is a great enemy of socialism in that his policies prolong capitalism self-mutilation

Rather, I'd think the objection is that Keynes advocates for capitalism, an inherently contradictory system.