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# Capitalism-and-Its-Critics-A-History-From-the

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During the ensuing decades, Kondratiev was largely written out of Soviet textbooks, which presented Stalin’s policy of forced collectivization and industrialization as essential and highly successful. Although the precise figures are still disputed, there is general agreement that Soviet GDP and industrial output grew rapidly between 1928 and 1940. “There were impressive gains in heavy industries, mining and construction,” the British historian Orlando Figes, no defender of the Bolshevik regime, notes. “The Soviet Union became the world’s leading producer of oil, coal, iron ore, and cement, and it became a major world producer of manganese, gold, natural gas and other minerals.”56 But as Figes and other historians have also emphasized, the human cost of Stalin’s policies, especially the forced collectivization of agriculture, was unfathomable. In many areas, peasant farmers resisted the state seizure of their property and slaughtered their livestock. In 1932–33, there was a terrible famine. In Ukraine alone, it killed more than 3 million people, according to modern estimates. “For the whole of the Soviet Union, the figure can be nearly doubled,” Ian Kershaw wrote in his 2015 book, To Hell and Back: Europe 1914–1949.57

Despite the tragedy of collectivization, many Western economists came to regard Soviet industrialization as a successful, if brutal, example of a government giving a backward economy a “big push” toward modernization by making massive capital investments that were financed by squeezing the peasantry and the working class. More recently, however, some scholars have revived Kondratiev’s argument that other viable development strategies were available to the early Soviet Union. “The collectivization of agriculture was not necessary for rapid growth,” the economic historian Robert Allen wrote in a 2005 paper. “Industrial development would have been almost as fast had the five year plans been carried out within the framework of the NEP.”58 Questions have also been raised about the long-term economic impact of Stalin’s policies. In 2017 Sergei Guriev, a prominent Russian economist, and three colleagues published a paper in the Review of Economic Studies in which they argued, in Guriev’s words, “that while Stalin’s industrialization was brutally effective in moving labor from farm to factory, it greatly undermined productivity growth in both agriculture and industry, so on balance it only slightly outperformed the Tsarist trend.”59

★ ★ ★

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These revisionist arguments aren’t conclusive: there can be no guarantee that Kondratiev’s export-based development strategy would have worked. In the late 1920s, many Western countries were reluctant to trade with the Soviet Union for political reasons. Even if this reluctance could have been overcome, the Great Depression of the 1930s, which saw global trade collapse, would have presented another huge challenge. Still, the idea that Soviet-style industrialization was the only option for a backward country like Russia—a notion that became widely accepted in many parts of the developing world—was built on erasing the proposals of Kondratiev to develop the agricultural sector and integrate the Soviet Union into the global economy, at least partially.

Even as Kondratiev’s work was suppressed in the Soviet Union, his theory of long cycles continued to attract attention in the West, especially after Joseph Schumpeter, an eminent Austrian economist who taught at Harvard, featured it prominently in a 1939 book about business cycles. Schumpeter coined the term Kondratiev cycle,60 which is often converted to Kondratiev wave. Fascination with Kondratiev’s theory persisted even as some of Schumpeter’s colleagues in US academia echoed some of the methodological criticisms that Soviet economists had put forward in the 1920s. In a 1943 article in The Review of Economics and Statistics, the same journal that earlier had published a translation of Kondratiev’s article on long waves, George Garvy, an American economist at the National Bureau of Economic Research, went through Kondratiev’s data in detail and concluded that “he did not succeed in showing the existence” of long cycles.61

These criticisms live on. Even relying on the most modern statistical methods, it is difficult to differentiate underlying trends from short-term movements in economic time series, and it’s easy to identify spurious trends. Despite these difficulties, though, some contemporary economists have produced findings in the spirit of Kondratiev. After examining longterm data on GDP and intellectual patents for France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, three Greek economists wrote in The Journal of Applied Economics in 2018: “Our results confirm that long waves are present, explaining a significant share of overall variability of the actual data, both for economic activity as well as for the possibly underlying cause of applied technological evolution.”62

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In economics, statistical findings are rarely definitive. The main reason Kondratiev’s theory continues to fascinate is that, in broad terms, it seems to match our intuitive grasp of economic history. The first half of the twentieth century was so racked with wars and economic catastrophes that it’s hard to interpret. After 1945, though, many Western economies expanded strongly for about thirty years, then entered a period of weaker growth that lasted for about a quarter of a century. Was this the fourth Kondratiev wave? Some economic observers think so, and they have identified a fifth wave that began in the mid-1990s, with major investments in the commercial development of the internet and online commerce. Unlike some of his latter-day followers, Kondratiev wasn’t a technological determinist, but he did believe that industrial capitalism had strong powers of recuperation. Somewhat ironically, he made this argument just as the system’s ability to rebound from periods of crisis was about to be tested to the brink. During the eight years that Kondratiev languished in prison, the major capitalist economies experienced a slump so severe and extended it persuaded some Western commentators and scholars that capitalism was a lost cause. Even those Western economists and policymakers who thought the system was salvageable agreed that its survival depended on making it more stable and equitable. This quest would center on the ideas and policy recommendations of the economist whom Kondratiev had met in England: John Maynard Keynes.

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“The more troublous the times, the worse does a laissez-faire system work”

John Maynard Keynes’s Blueprint for Managed Capitalism

In the summer of 1922 Roy Harrod, a young Englishman who had recently graduated from Oxford University with high honors, knocked on the door of 46 Gordon Square, a handsome Georgian row house in London’s Bloomsbury neighborhood, where he had been invited to lunch. The economist John Maynard Keynes warmly greeted his visitor, who was there to seek career advice. Two other guests were also present, one of whom was a French economist. “The talk began without any pause; it was quick and animated,” Harrod recalled many years later. “Keynes was discussing with the Frenchman the latest gossip about Continental statesmen, their mistresses, their neuroses, as well as their political manoeuvers  … There was financial talk of the latest movements in the exchanges, budgetary positions, the international movement of money. This was still far beyond my ken.”1

Keynes had shot to international fame with his 1919 polemic The Economic Consequences of the Peace. The book savaged the postwar Treaty of Versailles, in which the victors in the Great War, at the behest of France and Belgium, imposed heavy reparations on Germany. In his role as an economic adviser to the British Treasury, Keynes had been part of the British delegation at Versailles, but he left the conference early in protest at the punitive nature of the treaty. If the allies deliberately aimed to impoverish Germany and the rest of central Europe, “vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp,” Keynes wrote. “Nothing can then delay for long that final civil war between the forces of Reaction and the despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the late German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilization and the progress of our generation.”2 Keynes’s criticisms were well-founded. By 1922, the straitened government of the Weimar Republic had resorted to printing money, and a period of hyperinflation had begun. By the fall of 1923, prices would rise a trillion-fold relative to the prewar level, paper currency would be rendered virtually worthless, and many middle-class Germans would see their savings wiped out. Prices also rose sharply in other European countries, including Austria-Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Greece, causing widespread hardship and undermining political stability.

15

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Britain and France were in better shape than Germany, but they were still burdened with the enormous costs they had incurred in fighting the Great War. After entering the conflict as the world’s largest international creditor, with vast overseas investments, Britain exited it heavily dependent on loans from the United States, which had been the principal economic beneficiary of the cataclysm. As America’s bankers arranged credit for the allies, its manufacturers supplied them with armaments and other goods that Europe’s war-torn economies couldn’t supply. During the war years, US exports more than doubled, and US manufacturing production rose by 160 percent.3 This performance would continue during the 1920s, a boom period for the United States. In 1914 the US economy was already the world’s largest, but the combined production of the four major European economies —Britain, France, Germany, and Belgium—was larger. By the late 1920s, the US economy was nearly 50 percent bigger than the other four.4

In the developing world, too, the Great War unsettled the existing order. In India, Ireland, and Algeria, many people had joined allied armies during the conflict, and increasingly the citizenry demanded political rights from their colonial rulers. Nationalist movements also attracted support in Egypt, Iraq, and Vietnam. Acting through the Third International, or Comintern, which was founded in 1919, the Soviet Union encouraged these developments. The Comintern’s second congress, which took place in 1920, passed a resolution that said every leftist party affiliated with the organization had “the obligation of  … supporting every liberation movement in the colonies not only in words but in deeds.”5 In the United States and the Caribbean, meanwhile, some Black activists were expressing support for the independence of African nations. In an August 1921 speech to a meeting in New York of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, an organization that he had founded in 1914, the Jamaican Marcus Garvey Jr. declared: “This convention believes in the right of Europe for the Europeans, Asia for the Asiatics, and Africa for the Africans, those at home and those abroad.”6

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In Egypt and southern Ireland during the early 1920s, these stirrings led to independence. Elsewhere, the nationalist movements were as yet too weak to overthrow colonialist regimes, but the war and its aftermath had gravely weakened the imperial order and the trading relations it supported. Between 1914 and 1921, the volume of global trade fell by about a fifth. Many countries, including the United States and even Britain, moved to protect their own industries and partially or fully suspended participation in the gold standard, an international currency regime that tied the levels of exchange rates to the precious metal. Postwar efforts to reconstitute the pre-1914 economic system quickly faltered. As long as the Democrat Woodrow Wilson remained in the White House, it had seemed possible that the United States would take over Britain’s role as the principal promoter of free trade and international economic coordination. But the United States was a reluctant hegemon. In November 1919 the Senate rejected the Versailles Treaty, principally because of opposition to US membership in the new League of Nations. After the 1920 elections, the protectionist Republican Party controlled the White House and both houses of Congress. It quickly raised tariffs on industrial and agricultural imports well above their prewar levels.

As a liberal internationalist, Keynes supported free trade and global economic integration. The son of another Cambridge economist, John Neville Keynes, he was born on June 5, 1883, and educated at Eton College, the traditional stomping ground of the British elite, and King’s College, Cambridge. To all outward appearances, he was a typical uppermiddle-class Englishman: tall, plum voiced, conservatively attired, and patriotic. After graduating from King’s in 1905 with a first-class degree in mathematics, he joined the British civil service and worked for a couple of years in the India Office. There is no record of him raising any objections to British rule. “He believed the regime protected the poor against the rapacious money-lender, brought justice and material progress, and gave the country a sound monetary system: in short, introduced good government to places which could not develop it on their own,” the historian Robert Skidelsky commented in his magisterial three-volume biography of Keynes.7

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When Harrod visited him in Gordon Square, Keynes was splitting his time between King’s College, where he held a teaching post, and London, where he was a prolific journalist, an economic adviser to the Liberal Party, and a member of the close-knit community of artists and writers known as the Bloomsbury Group. The Post-Impressionist painter Vanessa Bell, who was the sister of Virginia Woolf, occupied the upper floors of 46 Gordon Square with her husband, Clive Bell, an art critic. The author Lytton Strachey, another Bloomsbury member, kept a residence a few doors away at number 51. Adrian Stephen, a psychoanalyst who was the younger brother of Vanessa and Virginia, was at number 50. Woolf herself lived in a distant suburb with her husband, Leonard. She compared Gordon Square to the lions’ house at the zoo. “One goes from cage to cage,” she wrote to a friend. “All the animals are dangerous, rather suspicious of each other, and full of fascination and mystery.”8

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Keynes was a liberal progressive, but a very British one. He had no time for continental doctrines, including Marxism, which he regarded as muddled and outdated, or for the uneducated proletariat. (“The Class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie,” he remarked in a 1925 address.)9 Throughout his life, his basic attitude to capitalism didn’t change much. It mirrored Winston Churchill’s famous aphorism that democracy was the worst form of government except for all the others. Keynes believed that a properly run system of global commerce based on private enterprise would deliver rising living standards, promote civilization (which to his mind meant higher learning and the fine arts), and preserve individual liberty (which he held sacrosanct) more effectively than any other economic system. The phrase “properly run” is a vital qualifier. Keynes’s faith in the market system didn’t extend to supporting laissez-faire, which he viewed as another outdated dogma. Unlike his intellectual sparring partner (and fellow collector of antiquarian books), the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, he didn’t invest the profit motive with any higher morality or free markets with magical powers of self-organization. To him, capitalism was defensible only insofar as it delivered material goods and preserved liberty.

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In a famous 1930 essay, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” Keynes looked ahead a century to a world in which, assuming capital accumulation and productivity growth continued to rise steadily, “we are all of us, on the average, eight times better off in the economic sense than we are today.” In this world of plenty, the basic economic problem of providing everyone with a decent standard of living would have been solved, Keynes said. People would work much shorter hours—say, fifteen hours a week—and spend the rest of their time as they wished. “The love of money as a possession—as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life—will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semicriminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease,” Keynes wrote. And he went on: “All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.”10 Keynes was careful to point out, however, that this vision of a world moving beyond capitalist values was strictly a long-term one: “But beware! The time for all this is not yet … Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.”11

The immediate challenge was to harness capitalism’s productive powers while containing its darker aspects. When Keynes greeted Harrod, he was already thinking hard about how to accomplish this task. By the time of his death, in 1946, his name would be attached to an economic policy framework that ushered in Western capitalism’s most successful epoch and prompted even some of its most ardent antagonists to recalibrate their views.

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The construction of this framework process took place in three stages. During the 1920s, Keynes intuited the basic monetary and fiscal apparatus that governments could use to guide capitalist economies. In the 1930s he elaborated on this framework and provided it with a theoretical justification that is now known as “Keynesian economics.” And in the 1940s, as World War II wound down, he played an important role, as a British government official, in extending the Keynesian framework to the international sphere, where it operated under the global leadership of the United States.

Keynes began his great project with an attack on the gold standard. In Britain and other countries, many policymakers, bankers, and economists believed that a sustainable return to prosperity would be possible only if the old currency system was restored. Once a country joined the gold standard, its money supply was limited by its stocks of gold, which ruled out inflationary money printing of the sort witnessed in Weimar Germany. Keynes didn’t deny that the system had been a linchpin of financial stability in the prewar era, but he argued that it was too rigid and outdated for the postwar world. In Britain, prices had more than doubled since 1914, which had put downward pressure on the value of sterling. The only way to restore the prewar parity with gold would be for the government to keep interest rates high enough to produce price deflation. With the unemployment rate still elevated from a postwar economic downturn, this policy would involve a great deal of additional economic pain, which Keynes believed was unnecessary and even dangerous.

In December 1923 he published A Tract on Monetary Reform, in which he described the gold standard as a “barbarous relic.”12 He called on the government to hand over responsibility for fighting inflation to the Bank of England, which could set interest rates considering the state of the domestic economy as well as the need to maintain price stability. If the economy was stuttering, it could reduce interest rates to give it a boost. If the economy was overheating, it could raise interest rates to cool it down and head off inflation. In modern terms, Keynes was calling for Britain to establish an independent monetary policy.

Another problem with the gold standard, he argued, was that so much gold had accumulated in the United States during and after the war that it had effectively become a “dollar standard.” If Britain reentered the system, it would “surrender the regulation of our price level and the handling of the credit cycle” to the Federal Reserve System, which had been created in 1913 and primarily concerned itself with economic conditions in the United States.13 Far better to delegate responsibility to the “Governors and Court of the Bank of England,” Keynes insisted. The golden straitjacket no longer worked to Britain’s advantage: it was time to create “a discretionary authority in the State to revise what has become intolerable.”14

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Keynes’s attack on the gold standard was part of a larger argument about the need to move beyond nineteenth-century individualism and laissez-faire. Two days after the publication of the Tract, he delivered a lecture to the National Liberal Club in which he said, “It is obvious that an individualist society left to itself does not work well or even tolerably. The more troublous the times, the worse does a laissez-faire system work.”15 What was needed wasn’t “out of date” socialism, Keynes went on, but wellthought-out interventions targeted at specific problems. His plan to replace the gold standard fell into this category, he insisted, and he issued a warning to “the Gentlemen of the City [of London] and High Finance”: unless they embraced the need for change, “the system upon which they live will work so very ill they will be overwhelmed by irresistible things which they will hate much more than the mild and limited remedies offered them now.”16

This warning was ignored. In April 1925 Churchill, who held the post of chancellor of the exchequer despite a shocking ignorance of economics, announced that Britain was rejoining the gold standard and setting the value of the pound at its prewar level of \$4.86. Keynes wrote a withering pamphlet, The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill, in which he argued that this decision would condemn the British economy to many more years of stagnation and deflation. If the government insisted on rejoining the gold standard, Keynes added, it should have rejoined at a much lower parity to reflect the fact that the competitiveness of the UK economy had declined since 1914.

With an active monetary policy no longer a policy option, Keynes was already moving on to develop the second weapon in his armory: fiscal policy. In April 1924 David Lloyd George, the former Liberal prime minister, wrote a letter to The Nation and Athenaeum, a magazine that Keynes now co-owned, in which he called on the government to employ the jobless on worthwhile projects such as building public utilities. Lloyd George’s letter sparked a lively debate, which Keynes entered, on May 24, with an article entitled: “Does Unemployment Need a Drastic Remedy?” His answer was that it most certainly did. The UK Treasury, Keynes wrote, should spend “up to (say) Sterling 100,000,000 per year on the construction of capital works,” such as affordable housing, new roads, and electricity transmission lines.17 To raise this money, the government could issue bonds and soak up some of the financial capital that was being invested abroad. “By conducting the national wealth into capital developments at home, we may restore the balance of our economy,” he argued. “Let us experiment with boldness on such lines—even though some of the schemes may turn out to be failures, which is very likely.”18

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