Translated, edited, and abbreviated

Very few of the articles written by the American economist Stephen Marglin have been translated into French. One of them, “What Do Bosses Do?” appeared in an abbreviated form in 1973 (and was republished in a complete version with a commentary by Bruno Tinel in 2004). The Harvard professor, who had begun as a brilliant neoclassical economist—he reached the summit of the academic hierarchy in 1969, one of the youngest Harvard professors ever granted tenure—took a diametrically opposed position to the then dominant economic theory, according to which the level of wages is fixed by the market equilibrium of the supply of and demand for labor. He showed that power relations were also important, indeed more important, becoming with this work a leader in what is called radical economics in the United States and heterodox economics in France.

Last summer Marglin published Raising Keynes: A Twenty-First Century General Theory, a work crowning his long career, in which he offers a new reading of the British economist John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money…  According to Marglin the usual interpretation has betrayed the true meaning of Keynes’s magnum opus…

This interpretation is the basis of policies deployed over the last 50 years to restore a “natural equilibrium “of prices, wages, and output: inflation targeting, labor-market flexibility, deregulation to unleash growth, etc.  But for Marglin, Keynes in reality demonstrates that capitalism does not possess the capacity for self-regulation; its dysfunctions are intrinsically tied to its functioning… It is not a question of “externalities” which can be “internalized” by making markets work better, but a problem of how a market economy functions.

A liberal democratic state cannot therefore be just a regulator that corrects occasional market failures by budgetary stimulus or tax incentives, but must be a fully engaged economic actor, carrying out social investment for the common good. In fact the liberal democratic state already has taken on this role, without this being recognized in the dominant economic theory and the political discourse inspired by the theory.

Marglin had already observed in earlier publications like The Dismal Science how the concepts and representations of mainstream economics were translated into the neoliberal ideologies that dominated the political sphere over the last several decades. There is no Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher without Milton Friedman. Today Marglin dreams of seeing progressive political movements in Europe and the US furnished with an economic theory capable of accounting for the reality and the needs of the 21st century. In the shadow cast by the great Keynes.