At first sight no two persons could
have been more dissimilar. One was a Cambridge don, with more than one
foot in the British government; a supporter of the Liberal Party, staunchly
opposed to the Bolshevik Revolution; an aesthete and a member of the Bloomsbury
Group; a life peer in imperial Britain; and a solid, if sensitive, member
of the British establishment. The other was a Russian revolutionary, spending
years in exile in acute penury, immersed in bitter conflicts among the
emigres, until suddenly confronted with a revolutionary uprising whose
strivings and possibilities he comprehended with such clarity that he
came to lead it, facing a civil war, a typhus epidemic, and an assassination
attempt that ultimately claimed his life. The secure tranquility of the
life of the one contrasted sharply with the tempestuous violence that
continuously haunted the life of the other. What could these two have
in common?
For a start each felt a deep intellectual respect for the other, despite
their political differences. In his report to the Second Congress of the
Communist International, having called Keynes ''a British bourgeois pacifist'',
''a petit bourgeois philistine'', and ''an implacable enemy of Bolshevism'',
Lenin went on to base his entire thesis about why conditions were ripe
for a world revolution on Keynes' analysis in The Economic Consequences
of the Peace. He even paid Keynes the compliment that ''nobody had written
about the condition of capitalism better than Keynes''. Keynes on his
part not only referred in several places to Lenin's ''brilliance'', but,
in this same book, said apropos of inflation: ''Lenin is said to have
declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch
the currency; ..Lenin was certainly right.''
But mutual intellectual respect among bitter adversaries is neither unusual
nor particularly remarkable. What is really common to both these thinkers
is their belief that the hegemony of finance in the period of maturity
of capitalism had brought about a denouement where it became impossible
for the system to go on as before. Of course each had his own understanding
of why finance had made capitalism impossible, and each had his own reading
of where to go from there. But the belief that a sheer continuity of the
existing order was no longer possible was common to both.
Keynes saw the hegemony of finance as saddling capitalism with such extraordinarily
high levels of unemployment that people, he feared, would not for long
tolerate such an inhumane system. Under this hegemony, speculation was
no longer a mere bubble on a steady stream of enterprise, but became a
torrent that buffeted enterprise around. This became particularly so after
the prop that had sustained nineteenth century capitalism, namely the
pushing of the frontier, had reached its limits. Not only did employment
get determined largely by the whims and caprices of speculators, but in
the absence of this prop would remain much higher than before, of which
the Great Depression was a manifestation. He wanted the system to become
more humane in order to survive the challenge of socialism. And this it
could do by ensuring, through systematic State intervention in demand
management, that the level of employment was made independent of the whims
and caprices of financial speculators.
Lenin by contrast saw finance capital as striving everywhere for domination
and for the acquisition of ''economic territory'' at the expense of rivals.
Hence the rivalry between different ''national'' finance capitals (belonging
to big ''nations''), each backed by ''its'' State, would henceforth take
the form of bloody inter-imperialist wars, of which the first world war
was a manifestation. Escape from this predicament was possible only by
overthrowing the entire system of finance-dominated capitalism and by
ushering in socialism.
The turn of events was such that the ideas of both these thinkers were
tried out in practice, a fate denied to most and another element that
is common to both. Keynes' proposal for State intervention in demand management
in capitalist economies had few takers in the beginning, a fact that allowed
the Great Depression to persist outside of the fascist countries right
until the eve of the war when military preparations against the threat
of fascism finally pulled up levels of employment and activity. But in
the post-war period, with the balance of class strength shifting in favour
of the working class across the advanced capitalist world, of which the
emergence of social democracy was a manifestation, State intervention
in demand management got institutionalized, producing the so-called ''Golden
Age of capitalism''. And as regards Lenin, the response generated by his
call for the overthrow of capitalism, the Bolshevik Revolution and the
formation of the Communist International, the struggle of the Soviet Union
against fascism, its contribution to post-war decolonization and the spread
of socialism, constitute together the epic saga of the twentieth century.
But, again by an irony that unites both these thinkers, the historical
experiments unleashed by them, despite remarkable early promise, could
not reach successful fruition. The process of globalization of finance
made the nation-State that was supposed to override the whims and caprices
of finance, subservient precisely to these very whims and caprices for
fear of capital flight; as a result we have the current bizarre spectacle
of capitalist countries enacting one after another ''austerity measures''
in the midst of a recession, which will only accentuate the recession.
Keynes would be turning in his grave at this absurd course of events.
Likewise the Soviet Union founded under Lenin's leadership no longer exists;
Communist Parties, barring a few, have dwindled into insignificance; the
socialist credentials of China and Vietnam are barely visible and have
to be established by the committed few through elaborate theoretical and
statistical exercises; and a question mark hovers over the fate of Cuba,
buffeted by imperialism. Those who invoke either Keynes or Lenin today
are few and far between.
Does this mean then that the projects of both Keynes and Lenin are equally
passé? The answer is no, and this constitutes the big contrast
between the two. Because Lenin's project was grand, nothing short of bringing
about a wholly new world order, the like of which mankind had only dreamt
of but never seen, and that too against the bitterest possible opposition
from the propertied classes, he was acutely aware of the prospects of
the failure of his particular experiment. In fact after Soviet power had
lasted three months, he had remarked gleefully: ''we have lasted longer
than the Paris Commune!'' Because of the grandeur of his project the possibility
of the failure of his particular experiment t was anticipated by Lenin.
But not so with Keynes.
Since his objective was to defend the system of private property against
socialism, he not only expected no systematic opposition from the propertied
classes, but even attributed whatever opposition he actually encountered
from them to mere intellectual failure on their part. After all, if demand
management by the State increased the level of activity and employment
in the economy, then that would benefit both the workers (through larger
employment) and the capitalists (through larger profits). So the predicament
of late capitalism was one from which, if one had the correct intellectual
comprehension, one could improve everybody's condition. What Keynes did
not see is that State intervention in capitalism is something which sets
off a dialectic of its own that ultimately subverts the domination of
capital over labour. Not that Great Depression-levels of mass unemployment
are necessary for capitalism but the elimination of such levels of mass
unemployment through State intervention undermines the social legitimacy
of the system. The setback to Lenin's project would not have surprised
Lenin; the setback to Keynes' would have surprised Keynes. Lenin's project
will be revived, but not Keynes', except as a staging post in the march
towards Lenin's goal.