Bourgeois Economics in the Era of Ex-Capitalist Transition

Abstract

In reviewing the process of the “disintegration of capitalism” above, I referred only in passing to the evolution of bourgeois economics during that process. But the prevailing opinion today is that bourgeois economics has somehow attained “paradigmatic legitimacy” given that it appears to have been “naturalized” as an “objective science”, however imperfectly. Such a misguided view, though I have already dismissed it out of hand, has been reinforced particularly after the “neoclassical resurgence” in bourgeois economics in the 1980s, together with the rejection of Keynes that followed, especially after the end of the Cold War. In this chapter, I wish to review how in the course of the disintegration of capitalism that sort of self-deceptive view has demonstrated its remarkable staying power through the vicissitudes of an eventful economic history from the Peace of Versailles to the present. The third generation neoclassical economists found that, with the sudden disappearance of their strong rival (the German school of Socialpolitik), the so-far distinct regional difference of style among themselves in Europe (with centres in Vienna, Lausanne and Cambridge) also disappeared, as their influence extended also to the United States. Perhaps they were also influenced, in the meantime, by the new developments in physics in the light of discoveries of quantum mechanics and relativity. But if we examine the economic history of the world during the disintegrative process of capitalism, it is clear that the intense feeling of nostalgia towards modernity and civil society never ceased to support and inspire the dominant power-structure of the existing society, and empowered it to resist all the symptoms of post-modern society, including Keynesianism with its curt message of the “euthanasia of the rentier”.