The postwar boom, rather than being a permanent refutation of Marx, was more like a fortunate historical blip — when the stars were aligned to regulate capitalism in a broad public interest. But one bad decade, the 1970s, was sufficient to restore both capitalists and the ideology of raw, free-market capitalism to their usual power — despite the verdict of history that raw capitalism keeps generating needless economic catastrophe. [...]
The postwar boom seemed to prove Keynes right. But one of Keynes’ lesser-known colleagues, the Polish-born economist Michal Kalecki, who located himself somewhere between Keynes and Marx, offered the following rebuttal: Even if it were possible as a matter of economics to harness a basically capitalist system to serve the broad mass of people, as a matter of politics the capitalist class would never let policymakers do it. [...]
This is not to say that Marx was entirely correct, however. He got one big thing wrong. Touchingly, he imagined that as capitalism became more and more destructive, the workers of the world would unite.
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