Future of Post Keynesian Economics session at 12th International Conference

1. THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN
THE STATE AND CAPITAL
AT THE PRODUCTIVE CORE OF THE ECONOMY

2. The productive core of the economy
• The wage/labor system
• The monetary production system
• Competing interests of particular capitals

3. The role of the state in
the productive core of the economy
• Maintain the wage/labor system
• Issue the sovereign currency and maintain its
legitimacy
• Mediate the competing interests of particular
capitals

4. The capitalist state
and the business enterprises
• Together determine the volume of employment and
output
• Create a demand for state money as a prerequisite to
access to the social provisioning process
• Wage laborers produces what the business
enterprises and the state want to produce, and, in
the process, materially reproduce themselves
• The origins of profit lie in the ability of the state and
the capitalists to force Labor to produce surplus

5. A summary of Post Keynesian
theories of the state so far
• Chartalism
• Policy prescription of permanent and structural
programs aimed at full employment, etc.
• Class theoretic understanding of production
• Role of the state in generating capitalist profits

6. Reflections…
• So what’s the issue? We’ve identified what we think
the capitalist state does or should do.
• We’ve identified what capitalism really is about.
• We’ve identified that the crises we face are not for
lack of economic capacity, and that all reasons are
political.
Is there anything more to say about the state?

7. People who talk about
revolution and class struggle
without referring explicitly to
everyday life… such people
have corpses in their mouths.
- Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

8. Fundamental assumptions revisited…
Assumption # 1:
The “economic” and the “political” are
formally and institutionally separate.

9. Fundamental assumptions revisited…
Assumption # 2:
Capital accumulation is an “economic”
process.

10. Fundamental assumptions revisited…
Assumption # 3:
The “national economy” is the
fundamental unit of analysis.

11. The composition of this book has been for the author a
long struggle of escape, and so must the reading of it be
for most readers if the author's assault upon them is to
be successful — a struggle of escape from habitual modes
of thought and expression. The ideas which are here
expressed so laboriously are extremely simple and should
be obvious. The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but
in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those
brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of
our minds.
J. M. KEYNES
13 December 1935