ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I shall attempt to examine John Maynard Keynes’s views on the working class and the relation of these views to his conception of the capitalist economy and his vision of its future development. My exploration is conditioned by two closely connected assumptions. The first is that Sir Austin Robinson was correct when he asserted that Keynes was a ‘perfect “do-gooder”, identifying the things that the world most needs to have done and using all his brains and persuasion to get them done’ (Robinson 1975:212). Among the things that should be done were corrections of the present society’s ‘failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes’ (ibid.). Second, Keynes therefore wrote The General Theory in order to show how the ‘disease’ of “‘involuntary” unemployment’ among the members of the working class, and their consequent ‘poverty in the midst of plenty’, might be cured (Keynes vol. 7:372, 381, 6, 30).1 As Keynes put it himself in 1940, he was working for ‘an advance towards economic equality greater than any which we have made in recent times’, which, among other measures, would include ‘accumulation of working-class wealth under working-class control’ (Keynes vol. 9:368). It was therefore logical for Keynes to view himself as a practitioner of ‘a moral science’, namely that of an economics that employs ‘judgments of value’ (Keynes vol. 14:297).
