Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present by Utsa Patnaik & Prabhat Patnaik

Author:Utsa Patnaik & Prabhat Patnaik
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2021-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

Concluding Observations

The Great Depression was a period when world capitalism was between external props. The prop of the colonial arrangement had gone, which is not to say that colonialism had become obsolete, but rather that there was no new prop, such as what direct state intervention in demand management could provide.

Indeed, colonialism and state intervention in demand management are the only two possible external props that capitalism can use. Schumpeter attributes to Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace an understanding precisely of this kind (though of course neither Keynes nor Schumpeter mentioned colonialism), namely that the pre–First World War conditions under which capitalism had thrived had passed and that capitalism would now need a new basis for a boom, which could only be provided by the state. He then suggests that the intellectual agenda that was to be carried to completion in the General Theory had already been sketched out in The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Whether this reading of The Economic Consequences of the Peace is correct is beside the point; the fact of capitalism in the interwar period, having run out of props, without which it cannot grow, is undeniable.

That capitalism had run out of leaders, as Kindleberger suggests, was merely a manifestation of the more basic fact that it had run out of props. The Great Depression was so deep and prolonged because of this basic fact.

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