Marx and Keynes is, most of the time, about Marx or Keynes. And that’s fine. Interestingly, the two are only truly put into conversation in the last essays, in which Mattick discusses Keynes’ avoidance of the brutalities of imperialism, and the attractiveness of ‘revolution’ outside the capitalist core not as a Marxist project (in the case of the USSR, China, Cuba, etc.) but first and foremost a Keynesian revolution to establish sufficient fixed capital and force investment over rich hoarding (in a sense, driving consumption as low as possible so as to maximize effective demand through the back door. Throughout, Mattick makes it perfectly clear that the bulk of what passed for Marxism in his time was properly Keynesian—though this may be overstepping, it is not doing so by much, and moreover his extremely wide definition of Keynes’ project as one of establishing mixed economy ultimately provides necessary rigor to an essentially universal conception. The mixed economy, then, is that in which a public and private sector coexist; at one end, in which the market exists in laissez-faire autonomy and the state is basically there as an organism to prosecute war; at the other, the state has swamped the entire market, capitalist accumulation has collapsed (and thus capitalism itself), and state-capitalism or state-socialism reigns (Mattick makes little distinction between these two). He writes:
“…the mixed economy can exist as long as an increasing productivity yields a sufficient social product. Production must be large enough to maintain the necessary profitability for the stagnating or relatively declining private capital, to secure existing living standards, and to allow for a growing quantity of non-profit production…In the long run, however, and with the continuous faster growth of the “public” as against the “private” sector of the economy, profit-production must contract. To prevent this development, government-induced production must remain a limited part of total social production”.
Mattick’s discussion of the interaction between public and private sectors explicitly underscores the failures of a Keynesian “Marxism”: the state is summoned, of course, to pick up the slack in failing capitals and industries, such as in mining and rail in England after WWII; otherwise, the program for the state in this environment is essentially to function as a firm which may, or perhaps must, run at a loss, or a laundering mechanism by which tax inputs are expeditiously turned into wages. However, Mattick seems to think state intervention is a process which is possessed of its own momentum, owing to his understanding of entry and exit problems and a rather strange idea of what it means to operate agnostic to surplus value in a capitalist economy. The conditions of which he speaks, in which public and private production and capitals exist side by side, nevertheless remain capitalist to their core: buttressed by a “vast increase” in “pseudo-productivity” delivered by technological advancement, the state ultimately is destined to become the sole monopoly.
Mattick arrives at this consideration through a long discussion of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall as the cancerous propensity towards crisis in the capitalist system. A decline in the amount of surplus value available socially due to the rising share of fixed capital in the organic composition of capital will result in a greater rate of exploitation so as to extract more surplus value from labor. This will create a condition of overaccumulation paired with low demand—and of course, these unsaleable commodities contain even less surplus value than those before, but this is never realized in their purchase. Overproduction must nevertheless continue, “instead of leading to a curtailment of productivity…thereby indicating that the discrepancy between the production of surplus-value and its realization arises because of a decline in the rate of accumulation”. That this point of value stalling comes during a period of prosperity and successful capital formation is typical—here Mattick hearkens to Keynes’ notion of the business cycle in macroeconomics. At this point, crisis looms as an inevitability. The only possible measure of avoidance is to alter the conditions of production of directly, that is, by modifying the layout (nationally or internationally) of firms, capital in the production process, and labor so as to allow for greater and consistent means of capital formation. This may happen consciously or by luck (say, for example, the discovery of a New World, or a World War) or, as is likely, by a crisis in which accumulation itself is interrupted for a time as the capital landscape is subjected to violent upheavals and many smaller capitalists fall into the working class, thereby fortifying a tendency towards monopoly.