ABSTRACT
The work of Michal Kalecki has been seen as a key bridging point between Marx and Keynes. Although Kalecki was in many ways the equal of Keynes, independently working out some of the same ideas, they came from very different backgrounds. Whereas Keynes had a classical Oxbridge education, moving from Eaton to Cambridge, Kalecki went to Gdansk Polytechnic; and whilst Kalecki was an official in the UK Treasury, revered by the British establishment, Kalecki was schooled in the underworlds of European Marxism.1 From these roots, Kalecki developed an interpretation of the reproduction schema, in which aggregate demand is the main driving force. Under the auspices of the ‘Kalecki principle’, that capitalists earn what they spend, the role of money is brought into focus. The thrust of this principle is expressed by Marx in Capital, volume 2: ‘In point of fact, paradoxical as it may seem at the first glance, the capitalist class itself casts into circulation the money that serves towards the realisation of the surplus-value contained in its commodities’ (Marx 1978: 409).
