The relevance of Kalecki’s ‘Political Aspects of Full Employment’ to the twenty-first century

In 1943 Kalecki published a path-breaking paper (Kalecki 1943b) entitled ‘Political Aspects of Full Employment’, a paper that took a somewhat pessimistic view of the prospects of a return to full employment in the capitalist democracies in the period following the cessation of hostilities. It was followed by other papers (Kalecki 1944a, 1945) in which he gave more detailed consideration to the types of policy initiative that would be needed to steer such economies towards the full employment goal.