| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Capitalism's ubiquity today can make criticizing or even observing
capitalism seem quaint. After all, we have internalized its teachings to
the point that our values and beliefs are largely aligned with those that
are functional to capital accumulation. It is all so embedded that today
a majority of American workers can live paycheck to paycheck with
little to no social insurance and still largely accept that their position
is one they deserve; the country's wealthy, meanwhile, benefit from
a seeming national allergy to any form of even mild tax reform that
would shift more tax burden to the wealthy. The current landscape is
quite different from the one technocrats were confronting in 1919, but
the two are most certainly connected.
Indeed, even an economic expert like Keynes, usually understood as
the most vocal critic of austerity,15 in 1919 was of a very different opin-
ion. He shared with colleagues at the British Treasury a sense of terror
around the threatened breakdown of the capital order-and surpris-
ingly enough, he also shared their austere solution to the capitalist cri-
sis. As the 1920s progressed, Keynes's economic theory of how best to
avoid crises did change; what did not change was his fundamental con-
cern to preserve capital order-what he described as the "thin and pre-
carious crust of civilization"16 that required protection. This existential
anxiety remains a cardinal feature of Keynesianism to this day.¹7 Even
though Keynes is not a central figure in this story, his intellectual bond
with several of austerity's principals remains essential to fully under-
standing the nature and impetus of the so-called Keynesian Revolution
later in the twentieth century.
17
0 件のコメント:
コメントを投稿