Re: Globalization and its Discontents

["J. Barkley Rosser, Jr." <rosserjb@xxxxxxx>]

Paul,
      Yes, Keynes did recognize Marx's priority
on that point and in a few other places as well.
But a substantially larger part of his GT framework
can be found in Volume III of Capital.  Of course
this was part of the whole issue between him and
Kalecki, with Kalecki's version very explicitly drawing
on Marx whereas Keynes did so much more indirectly.
      It is actually unclear to me to what extent Keynes
was really aware of the extent to which his framework
in the GT did resemble what could be in Marx.  I have
the impression that he really did not spend a lot of time
reading Marx as he did not fundamentally think much of him.
So, I think it is probably more a matter of unconscious
parallelism rather than stealing Marx's ideas without
proper attribution.  Clearly he was not completely ignorant
of Marx, but there are a lot of people who have read some
Marx but don't get around to digging through Vol. III of Capital.
Barkley Rosser
----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Davidson" <pdavidson@xxxxxxx>
To: "J. Barkley Rosser, Jr." <rosserjb@xxxxxxx>
Cc: <pkt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, April 20, 2002 9:24 AM
Subject: Re: Globalization and its Discontents


> At 04:10 PM 4/19/2002 -0400, you wrote:
> >      With regard to _The Commanding Heights_, I
> >   But the idea that his [Keynes's] views resembled
> >those of either Marx or Lenin are fairly ridiculous in general,
> >although much of his analytical framework can be found in
> >Marx, not a point recognized openly by Keynes himself.
>
> Not true at all! In his lectures leading up to the GT, Keynes specifically
> indicated that in the entrepreneurial system, the only function of the
> enterprise is to end up with more money than it started the production
> process with . Keynes then specifically indicated this was equivalent to
> the Marx 's
>   M-C-M' claim.
>
> \
>
> >And,
> >given the strong evidence that the spread of Keynesian policies
> >of various sorts has played a major role in stabilizing somewhat
> >macroeconomies in the post WW II era, the general thesis
> >of the series (and the book) that "Keynes was wrong and
> >Hayek and Friedman are right" is way overdone.
>
>
>
> And like most of Barkley's writings this is an understatement ---)!
>
> Paul
>
>