[D66] The End of Rational Capitalism

[Antid Oto]

http://monthlyreview.org/2005/03/01/the-end-of-rational-capitalism

REVIEW OF THE MONTH
The End of Rational Capitalism
John Bellamy Foster

The twentieth century’s dominant myth was that of a “rational 
capitalism.” The two economists who did the most to promote this idea 
were John Maynard Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter. Both were responding to 
the great historical crisis of capitalism manifested in the First World 
War, the Great Depression, and the Second World War. In the wake of the 
greatest set of horrors the world had ever seen, accompanied also by the 
rise of an alternative, contending system in the Soviet Union, it was 
necessary for capitalism following the Second World War to reestablish 
itself ideologically as well as materially. In terms of the ideological 
requirement, the two economists who accomplished this most effectively 
were Keynes and Schumpeter—not simply because they epitomized the best 
in bourgeois economic ideology, but also because they were the leading 
representatives of bourgeois economic science. What they set out in 
their analyses were the requirements of a rational capitalism and at 
least the hope that these requirements would be achieved.