Author (Category): Walden Bello

by Walden Bello*
originally posted on the Business Mirror

THE collapse of neoliberal economics, with its worship of the “self-regulating market,” has had among its most significant consequences the revival of the great English economist John Maynard Keynes.It is not only his writings that make Keynes very contemporary.There is also the mood that permeates them, one that evokes the loss of faith in the old and the yearning for something that is yet to be born.

Aside from their prescience, his reflections on the condition of Europe after the First World War resonate with our current mix of disillusion and hope: In our present confusion of aims, is there enough clear-sighted public spirit left to preserve the balanced and complicated organization by which we live? Communism is discredited by events; socialism, in its old-fashioned interpretation, no longer interests the world; capitalism has lost its self-confidence. Unless men are united by a common aim or moved by objective principles, each one’s hand will be against the rest and the unregulated pursuit of individual advantage may soon destroy the whole.