ABSTRACT
Introduction John Maynard Keynes was very much influenced by the two world wars, the Bolshevik Revolution, fascism, and the severe inter-war depressions of the world capitalist economy. These events led him to discredit the cosmopolitan and noninterventionist principles of market economies and urged him to find ways of safeguarding capitalism from the attacks by socialism and fascism. According to Keynes, high levels of unemployment and income inequality were the two “outstanding faults” (Keynes 1936: 372) of capitalism, which the state had to solve in order to defend capitalism. While he introduced a rationale for state intervention in market economies and proposed economic policies that he thought would save capitalism, he also propagated a “bourgeois socialist” politics that sought to change the existing material conditions for the betterment of the working class without altering the capital-labor relations. In this chapter I trace the development of, and also critique, Keynes’ analysis of capitalism and economic policy proposals. In particular, I am much concerned with Keynesians’ tendency to fall into the trap of a bourgeois utopianism, a state fetishism and an apologetics for capital (see Kim and Park 2007; Kim and Cho 1999).
