Of the several Progress Publishers volumes in this series that set out to demolish Western economics, this is the one that comes closest to doing honest work — and it is worth saying so at the start, because the usual charge does not stick. Irina Osadchaya's Keynesianism Today is not a pamphlet that condemns John Maynard Keynes from a safe distance and relays his arguments at second hand. It reads Keynes in the original, follows the neo-Keynesians and the post-Keynesians through their actual models, tracks Milton Friedman's monetarist counter-attack equation by equation, and arrives — in 1983 — at a diagnosis of the crisis of Keynesian economic policy that events had already begun to confirm. On its own subject, the failure of the post-war capitalist consensus, this is a serious book by a serious economist. The trouble is not what it says about capitalism. The trouble is the one economy it never once turns its instruments upon: the one it was written from.
Begin with the date, because the spine misleads in the ordinary way and the text corrects it. The English translation carries "© Progress Publishers 1983," and for once the argument does not lag behind the imprint — but neither is 1983 the whole story. Osadchaya opens her own Foreword by telling us exactly what we are holding: "This is a substantially re-written and enlarged version of the book From Keynes to Neoclassical Synthesis." That earlier book, she says a page later, appeared "five years" before — placing it around 1978 — and the rewriting was not cosmetic. The 1970s, she writes, "were marked by a deep crisis of bourgeois economic thought," and the new edition was built to take the measure of that crisis: two wholly new sections (Part Three on post-Keynesianism, Part Four rewritten "in the light of the experience of the 1970s"), a new treatment of monetarism, a new account of the collapse of the "neoclassical synthesis." This is the rare Progress title revised forward into its own moment rather than reprinted stale. Its latest references bear that out — it names "the Reagan Administration's conservative policy," quotes a Presidential message of 30 January 1980, and carries a 1982 citation. The Russian original — its title is more literally Contemporary Keynesianism (Sovremennoe keynsianstvo) — was completed around 1981–82. The book reads its real date, and its real date is the hinge of the century's economic history: the Volcker recession, the arrival of Reagan and Thatcher, the monetarist ascendancy, and the wreck of the Keynesian order that had governed the capitalist West since 1945.
Who wrote it? Here I will be careful, because the series' credibility rests on not inventing what it cannot source. The book's front matter gives Osadchaya no institutional title, and I will not manufacture one. What the text itself establishes is enough: she is a working academic economist with a prior monograph on the same subject, writing in the first person about her own earlier judgements, reading French and English sources in the original, and — a detail worth noting — translated into English by Yuri Sdobnikov, the same hand that edited Socialism and Capitalism: Score and Prospects elsewhere in this series. She is not an apparatus functionary assembling quotations. She is a specialist, and the book carries the marks of a specialist's respect for its material even as it fights it.
The citation test — the instrument that convicts most of these volumes — acquits this one, and it does so decisively. The recurring finding across this series is that Progress authors characterise their opponents without quoting them: the doctrine attributed to a Trotsky or a Kautsky sits in the author's own paraphrase, sourced to a Party Congress, never to the man's own page, so that it can be neither checked nor refuted. Osadchaya does the opposite. Keynes is named some three hundred and seventy times, and not as an epithet — his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money and the two-volume A Treatise on Money are cited from the Macmillan editions and quoted directly. Roy Harrod appears across nearly sixty passages, his Towards a Dynamic Economics (1948) worked through in its own terms, with the warranted, natural and actual growth rates set out and the instability of his model derived rather than asserted. Evsey Domar, Robert Solow, the Cobb-Douglas production function, the multiplier-accelerator cycle models — each is presented as a piece of machinery to be examined, not a slogan to be denounced. Joan Robinson and Nicholas Kaldor, the Cambridge post-Keynesians, are read at length; Piero Sraffa's Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities and the "transformation of value into the price of production" get a whole chapter; the newer American post-Keynesians — Clower, Leijonhufvud, Davidson, Minsky, Pasinetti — are named and engaged. And Friedman, the great adversary, is quoted from A Theory of the Consumption Function (1957), from the Monetary History of the United States he wrote with Anna Schwartz (1963), from his Journal of Political Economy articles and from Capitalism and Freedom — the monetarist theory of the cycle reconstructed step by step before it is criticised. Osadchaya even quotes the French economist Émile James in French. This is what reading your opponents looks like. Whatever one concludes about her verdicts, the evidence is on the table and can be tested — which is precisely what cannot be said of the volumes this series more usually reviews.
She is candid, too, about the method and its risks in a way that is rare in this catalogue. Her Foreword closes: "Since this book was written, developments may have invalidated some of my propositions. I would be grateful to those who do not simply read this book but go on to let me know of their criticism." And she is willing to fault her own tradition. Explaining why she has re-read The General Theory, she notes that the orthodox reading "is precisely the aspect of the theory which is dealt with in most Soviet writings containing a critical analysis of Keynes's theory, including my own" — and that she now wants to recover "the elements that were ignored both by that version and in our own writings." A Soviet economist conceding, in print, that Soviet criticism of Keynes had been one-sided is not a common sight. It is the sound of a scholar working, under constraint, against the grain of her own genre.
Her governing method is the one Lenin licensed, and she states it openly — which makes the book more interesting than a simple denunciation and also fixes the limit it cannot cross. Bourgeois economics, she argues, has two functions, "an ideological one and a practical one": it exists to justify capitalism, but it must also, for the practical business of managing the economy, produce real knowledge of how that economy works. The critic's task is therefore double — to expose the apologetics and to salvage the science. She quotes Lenin to authorise the salvage: bourgeois economists are "learned salesmen of the capitalist class," and the job of Marxists is "to be able to master and refashion the achievements of these 'salesmen' … and to be able to lop off their reactionary tendency." Her own formulation of the constructive half is a good one: the point is to "bring out the elements of genuine knowledge, to identify the scientific elements, which no economic theory can do without." Read as a programme for reading Keynes, this is generous and, on its own ground, productive. Read as a description of what the book will and will not permit itself, it is also the key to the book's central silence — for the salvage runs in one direction only.
Now credit what genuinely holds up, because a great deal of it does, and 1983 was the moment that proved it. The book's spine — the argument that runs through all four parts — is that Keynesian demand-management could postpone, disguise and displace the contradictions of capitalist accumulation but could never abolish them, and that the post-war "neoclassical synthesis" which married Keynes to the marginalists was therefore built on sand. By the time the English edition appeared, that thesis had been vindicated by events with a completeness few economic predictions ever achieve. The stagflation of the 1970s — simultaneous inflation and unemployment — was the one outcome the orthodox Keynesian model had ruled out, and it broke the model. Osadchaya sees this exactly. She names it: the decade produced "a totally new situation which came to be known as 'stagflation', and which upset all the old notions about the mechanism of the cycle and inflation." And she describes the resulting policy trap with real precision — in "the atmosphere of stagflation," governments trying to fight inflation by contracting demand and unemployment by expanding it found that "it was impossible simultaneously to expand and to contract demand," so that policy degenerated into "feverish swings between dampers and stimulants." That is the impasse that discredited the post-war consensus and opened the door to the monetarism she goes on to anatomise. She has it right.
She has the deeper cause right too, in her own idiom. The recessions of 1969–71 and 1974–75 — the latter, she notes, "the gravest since the Great Depression and the first postwar crisis to hit all the developed capitalist countries" — were for her not accidents of policy but expressions of "the basic contradiction of capitalism, that between the social character of production and the private form in which its results are appropriated." Demand-management could redistribute the strain across time; it could not dissolve it. This is where her book converges with the best Marxist economics being written in the West at the very same moment — and the convergence is the point. Ernest Mandel's Late Capitalism (English edition, New Left Books, 1975) had already argued that the Keynesian "solution" bought post-war full employment at the price of a structural, "permanent inflation" that would eventually become uncontrollable, and had set the whole post-war boom inside a Kondratieff "long wave" whose downturn was now arriving; his The Second Slump (1978) read the 1974–75 recession as the confirmation. Osadchaya, working from a different apparatus and forbidden some of Mandel's tools, reaches a strikingly similar destination: the boom is over, the crisis is structural rather than conjunctural, and the monetarist "cure" mistakes a symptom for the disease. On the economics of the capitalist West in the early 1980s, the Marxist diagnosis was simply better than the one that was about to triumph in Washington and London, and Osadchaya shares honestly in that vindication. A reader who wants to understand why the neoclassical synthesis fell apart will learn from this book.
Which makes the silence at its centre all the louder — and the silence is the finding. Reflexivity is the test this series has learned to trust above frequency counts and citation tallies: not how often a book uses its critical categories, nor even whether it quotes its opponents, but whether those categories could ever, in principle, be turned on the author's own side. Ask it of Keynesianism Today and the answer is a flat no, and the timing makes the no extraordinary. This is a book about the crisis of economic policy, published in 1983, at the depth of what the Soviet Union would later name its own "era of stagnation" — the last Brezhnev years, growth sliding toward zero, the shortage economy grinding on, the whole planning system three years from the reformers who would try and fail to save it. Every analytic instrument Osadchaya has sharpened on capitalism was available to be pointed homeward. Not one of them is.
Count the categories. "Stagnation" appears throughout the book — interwar Britain's stagnation, Hansen's stagnation theory, Robinson's "tendency to stagnation," the semi-stagnation of the American 1950s — and every instance is capitalism's. "Shortage" recurs — a shortage of capital goods in Harrod's model, a shortage of savings, the labour shortages of the industrial West, the US "National Commission on Supplies and Shortages" — and never once the shortage economy that defined daily Soviet life. "Soviet" occurs only to introduce Soviet writings and Soviet economists — the literature she draws on — never the Soviet economy as an object of analysis. The single "USSR" in the text is the publisher's postal address on the last page. The socialist economy is present in the book, but only ever as capitalism's serene and unexamined opposite. Marx's theory of reproduction, she writes, is "the theoretical foundation for socialist economic planning" — planning being, by definition, the thing that works. And the book's very last paragraphs make the point with a confidence that would be poignant if it were not so revealing. Surveying the West's inconclusive debates over "planning," she insists that "there is a profound qualitative distinction between the capitalist planning and socialist planning," because genuine national economic planning "is ensured only by social property in the means of production, which is why it cannot be practised in the capitalist countries." Genuine planning is guaranteed by socialist ownership. The sentence was published as the genuine article was seizing up in every queue and every unmet quota from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok.
This is the pattern a sibling volume in this series names precisely: error is admissible, the category is not. A Soviet economist may concede, as Osadchaya does of her own earlier work, that a particular analysis was incomplete. What the frame forbids is the thought that the categories of crisis, stagnation, shortage and disproportion — the whole toolkit she wields so capably against the West — might describe the economy she was writing from. Her instruments were built to diagnose exactly the disease her own system had contracted. She could see, with real acuity, that Keynesian demand-management could paper over but never abolish capitalism's contradictions. She could not ask, and the book is constructed so that no reader is invited to ask, whether Soviet central planning was papering over contradictions of its own. The analyst who could describe the stagflation trap in a single flawless sentence was structurally incapable of turning to the window and describing what she saw there. The same closure runs through the neighbouring economics volumes: V. V. Rymalov's The World Capitalist Economy (Progress, 1982), which diagnoses Western stagflation exactly while presenting CMEA as "the most dynamically developing economic community in the world," and the Sdobnikov-edited Socialism and Capitalism: Score and Prospects (1971), which reserves the entire vocabulary of economic failure — crisis, unemployment, inflation, shortage — for the other side. Same house, same instruments, same reflexive silence. It is not a personal failing of Osadchaya's. It is the boundary of the permitted conversation, and it is drawn in the same place in every book that crosses this desk.
The tools she was denied are the ones her Western counterparts used to ask the forbidden question. Two of them stand out, and both were absent from Soviet economics by more than accident. The first is the long wave. Mandel's Late Capitalism organised the entire post-war epoch around a Kondratieff cycle of expansion and depression — but long-wave theory was heterodox in the USSR, and its originator, N. D. Kondratiev, had been shot in 1938; a Soviet economist of 1983 reached for it at her peril. The second, and more decisive, is the falling rate of profit turned on real data. Mandel derived the structural downturn of the 1970s from a secular decline in the average rate of profit; Osadchaya's apparatus — "the general crisis of capitalism," "state-monopoly capitalism," the social-versus-private contradiction — could describe the results of the crisis but was ill-equipped to anatomise its mechanism, and it offered no way at all to ask the reflexive question, because the falling rate of profit is a category that presupposes profit, and Soviet planning was defined as the realm where that category did not apply. The point is not that Mandel was infallible; it is that his framework could take the socialist economies as a proper object of economic analysis, and hers, by construction, could not. That difference was being argued out in exactly these years, in the pages of Quatrième Internationale, in the long debate between Mandel and Alec Nove over whether a planned economy could dispense with the market — a debate whose very first premise is that the socialist economy is something to be analysed rather than celebrated. That premise is the one thing Keynesianism Today cannot grant.
And where a reader wants the reflexive analysis Osadchaya cannot perform, the answer was already old. Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed (1936) had turned the categories of political economy on the Soviet economy itself half a century before — the bureaucracy as a privileged stratum living off the administration of scarcity, the planned economy as a contradictory and crisis-prone formation rather than a serene one, the shortage and the queue as the material basis of bureaucratic power rather than as embarrassing accidents. It is the missing chapter of this book: the one in which the instruments are pointed homeward. That Osadchaya could not write it is not a measure of her ability, which the rest of the volume amply demonstrates. It is a measure of what her position would allow her to see, and of the price her genuine talent paid for the ground it was permitted to stand on.
So the verdict divides cleanly, and the division is the reason to reprint it. As an account of why the Keynesian settlement collapsed — what stagflation was, why the neoclassical synthesis could not survive it, how monetarism rushed the vacancy, what Friedman and the Cambridge post-Keynesians actually argued — this is a competent, well-sourced, and in places genuinely illuminating book, whose central thesis the 1980s proved out. Read it for that and it repays the reading; the citation test acquits it, and the acquittal is earned. But read it as a document of its moment and it becomes something sharper and sadder: a first-rate diagnostician anatomising the sickness of one economic order at the precise instant her own was sickening in ways her method was built to detect and forbidden to name. The book's power and the book's blindness are the same faculty, pointed in the only direction it was allowed to face. That is the truest thing Keynesianism Today records — not about Keynes, whom it reads well, but about the intellectual world that produced so capable a reader and set so exact a limit on what she could turn her capability upon.