Keynes treated unemployment as technical, missing its political role.

Evidence

In Italy, as in many other countries, unemployment plays a primary role in creating a sense of material and psychological powerlessness that hinders collective challenges to the capitalist pillar of wage labor. Fear of losing employment is what holds our system together, yet this is underplayed by many economists, even a great like Keynes. The British scholar highlighted that the market economy tends to generate underemployment, but he never questioned his colleagues’ dismissal of exploitation from their models. Indeed, he assumed that labor and capital were both equal inputs of the production process, a parable of cooperation between capital and labor in the production of goods and services. In this apolitical framework, unemployment is seen as a “technical” problem, solvable through good public policies aimed at full employment. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 254

Categorization

• XREF: The reader wants to stress-test austerity-as-class-instrument; this Keynes critique frames that debate. — connects to: Keynes’s famous account of how economic ideas reach politics is badly flawed. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 42