Catastrophe or Revolution
by Emiliano Brancaccio and Samuele Bibi
pp. 18-45 Issue 17 (9,1) – January-June 2022 ISSN (online): 2539/2239 ISSN (print): 2389-8232 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14718/SoftPower.2022.9.1.2
Abstract
The former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund argued that a Keynesian “revolution” of economic policy is needed to avoid a future “catastrophe”. His thesis is submitted here to a critical examination on the basis of a criterion of scientific investigation of the historical process defined as the “law of reproduction and tendency of capital”. A prediction emerges from this research method: the freedom of capital and its tendency to centralize in fewer and fewer hands constitutes a threat to other freedoms and to the liberal democratic institutions of our time. Given such a perspective, Keynes is not enough, just as it is not enough to invoke income. The only revolution capable of avoiding a catastrophe of rights lies in the recovery and relaunch of the strongest lever in the history of political struggles: collective planning, understood this time in the new and subversive sense of a factor in the development of free social individuality and of a new liberated human type. A challenge that calls into question an entire architecture of beliefs and imposes a reflection on all the movements of struggle and emancipation of our time, still locked in the narrow enclosure of a liberal paradigm already in crisis.