Surviving Capitalism (Not) : Keynes versus Hayek

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Keynes versus Hayek

by Henry C K Liu from Asia Times Online. (A re-post of an article of his from 1999) The two page article is a good summary of the two schools of capitalist economic theory and the application of each to keep the inherently unstable capitalist system running over the past 75 years. Liu, a highly educated economist, is a Keynesian, but his understanding of socialism is flawed by the historical stillborn birth of socialism in the Soviet Union. Hence "socialism" for many bourgeois educated people has come to mean an economy and society governed by a state bureaucracy instead of the soviet [local worker] councils which was the original intention. Unfortunately, it was the former which actually developed shortly after the revolution in the Soviet Union. Why this happened has been subject to endless debate and obfuscated and distorted by capitalist propaganda.