Marx, Kalecki and Keynes

So, my readings tell me that a man named Michał Kalecki (Polish socialist economist) developed the theory of effective demand in 1932 in his analysis of capitalism in the Great Depression, four years prior to Keynes in The General Theory. He crafted his Keynesian economic theory by refining and updating Marx's economics. He synthesised the works of Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg to introduce the concepts of monopoly capitalism (or in his interpretation, oligopolistic pricing) and investment as an exogenous factor in the determination of output, respectively, to macroeconomic theory. Keynes, who arrived at the same conclusions independently (and less coherently) in 1936, played an extremely important role in revolutionising the economic profession in the capitalist world by virtue of simply being Keynes - an upper-class, reputable British (previously orthodox) economist and public servant who was also a highly successful financial speculator - and therefore acceptable and respectable to capitalist governments.

The reason Keynesianism is called 'Keynesianism' and not 'Kaleckianism' is that no capitalist nation would have adopted, let alone paid any attention whatsoever to, the theories of a Polish socialist publishing initially in Polish and French. The ironic thing is that this Polish socialist economist, who later went on to advise the Cuban Government and head the Centre for Planning in communist Poland, designed the very policy tools which saved capitalism, TWICE (1938, 2008). What is doubly ironic is that Marx, the great scourge of capitalism, was the inspiration for the development of this theory. Indeed, Keynesianism, by doing away with the labour theory of value and debunking the classical, Marxian and neoclassical assumption that savings must always equal and determine the level of investment and that 'every frugal man a public benefactor' (Smith), is a most unique and revolutionary economic theory, and can trace its theoretical heritage directly to Karl Marx.

Gaff