In this talk from Revolution Festival 2019, Adam Booth – editor of www.socialist.net – compares and contrasts the economic ideas of Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, and MMT.
The crash of 2008 brought all the established neoliberal economic ideas into question. As Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman told an audience at the London School of Economics in the wake of the financial crisis: “Most work in macroeconomics in the past 30 years has been useless at best and harmful at worst.”
Over a decade on, and mainstream capitalist economists still have no answers or solutions.
Some on the left have attempted to fill the vacuum with alternative economic theories. These include old ideas, such as those of John Maynard Keynes; and new concepts, such as ‘Modern Monetary Theory’.
Neither of these tendencies, however, provide a genuine, scientific analysis of capitalism. Instead, both seek to patch up and reform the broken capitalist system.
In this talk, Adam looks at these economic ideas – old and new – and explains why only a Marxist perspective can offer a way out of capitalism’s crisis for the left and the labour movement.
