CU Panel discussion takes an economic turn

Examining the recent recession as a crucial turning point in world economic history, four academics attempted to parse what will come next at “Beyond Marx and Keynes,” a panel discussion on Wednesday sponsored by Columbia’s Committee on Global Thought.

Duncan Foley, a professor of economics at the New School, spoke first. He cautioned that the link between economic crisis and progressive social change is “very complex, very nonlinear,” alluding to the Tea Party movement as a political result of the downturn. He said that left-wing challenges to capitalism like those seen in the 1930s were very unlikely. Even reviving Keynesianism would be difficult, he argued, since such efforts would require global rather than national initiative.

Next was David Harvey, of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and author of the forthcoming book “The Enigma of Capital.” Rather than compare different approaches, Harvey delivered a blistering Marxist historical argument about capitalism as a process of continuous expansion. Citing the investment levels necessary to generate growth rates close to the historical norm of 2.25 percent per year, Harvey argued that this commitment to accumulation is increasingly “hard to sustain.” Because of this ultimate untenability, he maintains that we need to “start to think seriously about an anticapitalist transition ... that means class struggle.”

Perry Mehrling, a Barnard professor of economics, followed Harvey. Mehrling described the present moment as a “palimpsest” of past moments, which demanded the varied insights of Smith, Marx, and Keynes. Additionally, he described his forthcoming book “The New Lombard Street” as an attempt to revisit thinkers like Walter Bagehot and Hyman Minsky. Such a “money view” is important for confronting the increased financialization of the economy, “the central fact of our moment.”

The event concluded with remarks from Prabhat Patnaik, visiting from Jawaharlal Nehru University in India. He argued that the important difference between Marxist and Keynesian schools is not in economic concepts, since Marxist thinkers had anticipated parts of the latter approach and since Marxism was an open enough system to accommodate Keynes’ later insights. Echoing Harvey’s call for radical change, he located the vital difference in Keynes’ willingness to work within existing systems compared with Marx’s revolutionary outlook. The latter, Patnaik argued, is what the moment calls for.

While the speakers differed on matters of both theory and practice, their shared commitment to reexamining the bases of prevailing economic and political thought made for a stimulating evening.