AUT: Neo-Keynsian Globalism?

[Paul Bowman <pbowman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A spectre is haunting world economists, the spectre of Keynsianism...

To name but a few anecdotal sightings George Soros, international forex
speculator extraordinaire denounces the debilitating effects of
unrestricted capital flows into (and out of) "underdeveloped" economies
- releases book entitled "The Crisis of Global Capitalism" with an
apparently straight face; the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer (Minister
for Economy) delivers under-reported speech in New York expressing
opinion that some degree of restraint must be exercised on the global
market "that explicitly refers to the best of the tradition of Keynes" -
in the context of an EU in which now 13 out of 15 governments are headed
by parties nominally in the social-democrat tradition, this is not as
"against the current" as it would have been three years ago; even John
"Isn't-he-dead-yet?" Paul II gets in on the act denouncing global
liberal capitalism as a force for evil.

Of course words are cheap and the whole affair so far doesn't amount to
a heap of beans. Nonetheless those of us in the anti-capitalist camp who
have seen the slogan of "resistance against neoliberalism" rise to be
embraced by much of the contestationary movements that have spent the
last two decades fighting the strategies of monetarism, austerity and
deregulation adopted by the IMF, GATT/WTO, and OECD governments in the
70s, have to wonder if the neo-Keynsians are not considering the
possibility of recuperating some of the anti-neoliberalism movement for
the purposes of stabilising global capitalism.

As a micro-illustration there was a story on a-infos today about Polish
farmers blockading the German border against import dumping of cheap
pork. The author of the piece (see http://www.ainfos.ca/ainfos00205.html
) asks:

	"Is there an official opinion of the PGA concerning centralized
protectionist
	instruments used by the national governments? (The farmers
	are asking for more border taxes). Our group in Poland still
hasn't
	decided what to think about this issue."

(PGA being presumably People's Global Action network in this context).

I have no set answers or ideas about any of the above at present, does
anybody on this list have any?

cheers,


Paul Bowman
mailto:pbowman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
For every problem, there is one solution
which is simple, neat and wrong.
                                    -- H. L. Mencken


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