At
first sight no two persons could have been more dissimilar.
One was a Cambridge don, with more than one foot in
the British government; a supporter of the Liberal Party,
staunchly opposed to the Bolshevik Revolution; an aesthete
and a member of the Bloomsbury Group; a life peer in
imperial Britain; and a solid, if sensitive, member
of the British establishment. The other was a Russian
revolutionary, spending years in exile in acute penury,
immersed in bitter conflicts among the emigres, until
suddenly confronted with a revolutionary uprising whose
strivings and possibilities he comprehended with such
clarity that he came to lead it, facing a civil war,
a typhus epidemic, and an assassination attempt that
ultimately claimed his life. The secure tranquility
of the life of the one contrasted sharply with the tempestuous
violence that continuously haunted the life of the other.
What could these two have in common?
For a start each felt a deep intellectual respect for
the other, despite their political differences. In his
report to the Second Congress of the Communist International,
having called Keynes “a British bourgeois pacifist”,
“a petit bourgeois philistine”, and “an implacable enemy
of Bolshevism”, Lenin went on to base his entire thesis
about why conditions were ripe for a world revolution
on Keynes’ analysis in The Economic Consequences of
the Peace. He even paid Keynes the compliment that “nobody
had written about the condition of capitalism better
than Keynes”. Keynes on his part not only referred in
several places to Lenin’s “brilliance”, but, in this
same book, said apropos of inflation: “Lenin is said
to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist
system is to debauch the currency; ..Lenin was certainly
right.”
But mutual intellectual respect among bitter adversaries
is neither unusual nor particularly remarkable. What
is really common to both these thinkers is their belief
that the hegemony of finance in the period of maturity
of capitalism had brought about a denouement where it
became impossible for the system to go on as before.
Of course each had his own understanding of why finance
had made capitalism impossible, and each had his own
reading of where to go from there. But the belief that
a sheer continuity of the existing order was no longer
possible was common to both.
Keynes saw the hegemony of finance as saddling capitalism
with such extraordinarily high levels of unemployment
that people, he feared, would not for long tolerate
such an inhumane system. Under this hegemony, speculation
was no longer a mere bubble on a steady stream of enterprise,
but became a torrent that buffeted enterprise around.
This became particularly so after the prop that had
sustained nineteenth century capitalism, namely the
pushing of the frontier, had reached its limits. Not
only did employment get determined largely by the whims
and caprices of speculators, but in the absence of this
prop would remain much higher than before, of which
the Great Depression was a manifestation. He wanted
the system to become more humane in order to survive
the challenge of socialism. And this it could do by
ensuring, through systematic State intervention in demand
management, that the level of employment was made independent
of the whims and caprices of financial speculators.
Lenin by contrast saw finance capital as striving everywhere
for domination and for the acquisition of “economic
territory” at the expense of rivals. Hence the rivalry
between different “national” finance capitals (belonging
to big “nations”), each backed by “its” State, would
henceforth take the form of bloody inter-imperialist
wars, of which the first world war was a manifestation.
Escape from this predicament was possible only by overthrowing
the entire system of finance-dominated capitalism and
by ushering in socialism.
The turn of events was such that the ideas of both these
thinkers were tried out in practice, a fate denied to
most and another element that is common to both. Keynes’
proposal for State intervention in demand management
in capitalist economies had few takers in the beginning,
a fact that allowed the Great Depression to persist
outside of the fascist countries right until the eve
of the war when military preparations against the threat
of fascism finally pulled up levels of employment and
activity. But in the post-war period, with the balance
of class strength shifting in favour of the working
class across the advanced capitalist world, of which
the emergence of social democracy was a manifestation,
State intervention in demand management got institutionalized,
producing the so-called “Golden Age of capitalism”.
And as regards Lenin, the response generated by his
call for the overthrow of capitalism, the Bolshevik
Revolution and the formation of the Communist International,
the struggle of the Soviet Union against fascism, its
contribution to post-war decolonization and the spread
of socialism, constitute together the epic saga of the
twentieth century.
But, again by an irony that unites both these thinkers,
the historical experiments unleashed by them, despite
remarkable early promise, could not reach successful
fruition. The process of globalization of finance made
the nation-State that was supposed to override the whims
and caprices of finance, subservient precisely to these
very whims and caprices for fear of capital flight;
as a result we have the current bizarre spectacle of
capitalist countries enacting one after another “austerity
measures” in the midst of a recession, which will only
accentuate the recession. Keynes would be turning in
his grave at this absurd course of events. Likewise
the Soviet Union founded under Lenin’s leadership no
longer exists; Communist Parties, barring a few, have
dwindled into insignificance; the socialist credentials
of China and Vietnam are barely visible and have to
be established by the committed few through elaborate
theoretical and statistical exercises; and a question
mark hovers over the fate of Cuba, buffeted by imperialism.
Those who invoke either Keynes or Lenin today are few
and far between.
Does this mean then that the projects of both Keynes
and Lenin are equally passé? The answer is no,
and this constitutes the big contrast between the two.
Because Lenin’s project was grand, nothing short of
bringing about a wholly new world order, the like of
which mankind had only dreamt of but never seen, and
that too against the bitterest possible opposition from
the propertied classes, he was acutely aware of the
prospects of the failure of his particular experiment.
In fact after Soviet power had lasted three months,
he had remarked gleefully: “we have lasted longer than
the Paris Commune!” Because of the grandeur of his project
the possibility of the failure of his particular experiment
t was anticipated by Lenin. But not so with Keynes.
Since his objective was to defend the system of private
property against socialism, he not only expected no
systematic opposition from the propertied classes, but
even attributed whatever opposition he actually encountered
from them to mere intellectual failure on their part.
After all, if demand management by the State increased
the level of activity and employment in the economy,
then that would benefit both the workers (through larger
employment) and the capitalists (through larger profits).
So the predicament of late capitalism was one from which,
if one had the correct intellectual comprehension, one
could improve everybody’s condition. What Keynes did
not see is that State intervention in capitalism is
something which sets off a dialectic of its own that
ultimately subverts the domination of capital over labour.
Not that Great Depression-levels of mass unemployment
are necessary for capitalism but the elimination of
such levels of mass unemployment through State intervention
undermines the social legitimacy of the system. The
setback to Lenin’s project would not have surprised
Lenin; the setback to Keynes’ would have surprised Keynes.
Lenin’s project will be revived, but not Keynes’, except
as a staging post in the march towards Lenin’s goal.
(This
article was originally published in The Monthly Review
: April 23, 2011)
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