John Maynard Keynes and Communism

November 21, 2008 in Communism by Greg | 2 comments

John Maynard Keynes held communism in high regard. In June 1936, on a BBC radio program entitled “Books and Authors”, Keynes commented on Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s Soviet Communism: A New Civilization. Here is what he said:

Until recently events in Russia were moving too fast and the gap between paper professions and actual achievements was too wide for a proper account to be possible. But the new system is now sufficiently crystallized to be reviewed. The result is impressive. The Russian innovators have passed, not only from the revolutionary stage, but also from the doctrinaire stage.

There is little or nothing left which bears any special relation to Marx and Marxism as distinguished from other systems of socialism. They are engaged in the vast administrative task of making a completely new set of social and economic institutions work smoothly and successfully over a territory so extensive that it covers one-sixth of the land surface of the world. Methods are still changing rapidly in response to experience. The largest scale empiricism and experimentalism which has ever been attempted by disinterested administrators is in operation. Meanwhile the Webbs have enabled us to see the direction in which things appear to be moving and how far they have got.¹

Keynes also hoped for the same social experiment to be conducted in Britain:

It leaves me with a strong desire and hope that we in this country may discover how to combine an unlimited readiness to experiment with changes in political and economic methods and institutions, whilst preserving traditionalism and a sort of careful conservatism, thrifty of everything which has human experience behind it, in every branch of feeling and of action.²

By 1936, it was clear that these Soviet “administrators” had achieved something spectacular. According to Ralph Raico:

By 1936 no one had to depend on the Webbs’ deceitful propaganda for information on the Stalinist system. Eugene Lyons, William Henry Chamberlin, Malcolm Muggeridge himself, and others had revealed the grim truth about the charnel-house presided over by Keynes’s “disinterested administrators.”

Anyone willing to listen could learn the facts regarding the terror-famine of the early 1930s, the vast system of slave-labor camps, and the near-universal misery that followed on the abolition of private property. For those not blinded by “love,” it was not hard to discern that Stalin was erecting the model killer-state of the twentieth century.³

As I’ve studied John Maynard Keynes, I think it interesting that he was promoted as an independent thinker and a believer in “free society” even though it is more than evident that he was clearly a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Perhaps I should have titled this post – “What I Wasn’t Taught in Business School”! What’s your take on Keynes’ apparent political leanings towards socialism and communism?

Sources:

Keynes, John Maynard. Elizabeth Johnson and Donald Moggridge, eds. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. 28:333-334.↩
Ibid.↩
Raico, Ralph. “Keynes and the Reds“. 13 February 2002. Ludwig von Mises Institute. 21 November 2008.↩