A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

B. Keynes
1. Let’s be clear: the anti-crisis policies are not Keynesian. While ‘Keynesian’
measures are perceptible – in the G.W. Bush plan of 2008 for
example (with its handover of part of the taxes) and above all, with the
programme of President Barack H. Obama (with works of infra-structure,
etc.) – priority is clearly given to neoliberalism to save as much as possible
of the over-accumulated fictitious capital. The emergency conversion
of plans to rescue capital by State interventionism, organized in an
extremely anti-democratic way by the governments of the North, should
not deceive us. The anti-crisis policies and their initiators have not extricated
themselves from orthodox dogmas.
The Fed and the other central banks of the North continue to create primary
currency on a massive scale, only just recently again, with Quantitive
Easing No. 2. But this monetary policy which is apparently ‘Key nesian’
has in fact fallen into the ‘liquidity trap’, where the strategy of lowering
the rate of real interest has shown that it is incapable of correcting the
marginal effectiveness of capital and of transferring monetary capital
from the financial sphere into the productive sphere.
Hence the current concern in the United States since the beginning of
2011, which is the indebtedness of the State: of the Treasury, of the federal
State, but also of the federated states and local authorities. The
president of the Fed (Bernanke) recently warned the Secretary of the
Treasury (Geithner) and Congress that the hour has come for tightening
the plans for budgetary adjustment. In fact, that what must be done is
the exact opposite of what Keynes recommended ( which was to ‘clean
house’): reabsorb the deficit by increasing taxes and reducing expenses
by lowering the number of civil servants and their salaries, thus put-ting
the burden on to the workers including measures on health, pensions,
etc. The same thing for us in Europe.
So in fact there is no return to ‘Keynesian’ policies, either in the United
States or in Europe, and the dominating concept of the State remains
that of a neoliberal State, at the service of capital, particularly for the
credit system.
2. And even if there were to be (which is highly unlikely) a ‘return to
Keynes’, it would come up against several problems.
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