Date: 	Mon, 1 Feb 1999 11:24:29 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: AUT: Neo-Keynsian Globalism?


What are we to make of this new Keynesian criticism by Jeffrey Sachs, Paul
Krugman and Joe Stiglitz of the IMF policy of raising interest rates in the
face of destabilizing currency outflows? These neo Keynesians seem to be
recommending some combo of debt restructuring, low interest rates, currency
devaluations. The IMF hacks like Stanley Fisher counter that devaluations
will make impossible the honoring of the debt which the neo Keynesians seem
to implicitly recognize in their calls for debt equity swaps and the like.
There seems to be a family resemblance between the neo Keynesians and
Proudhon about whose schemes Marx wrote:

"The real enemy is capital [according to Proudhon]. The pure economic
affirmation of captial is interest...we negate the interest by transforming
it into an annuity, i.e., an annual payment on accounts of capital...Thus
the working class, that is the industrial working class is assured of
hegemony for ever, and the real capitalist class is condemned to a
continually dwindling existence...Bourgeois society is upheld in this way,
is justified and only deprived of its bad side.
"'Liquidation sociale' is merely the means to build a 'healthy' bourgeois
society from the very beginning."
Marx to Engels August 14, 1851

rakesh




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