Macroeconomic theory and policy in the capitalism of "permanent catastrophe"

This contribution takes the consequences of the Putin invasion of Ukraine as a starting point to discuss the multiple crises today’s capitalism is going through. What the invasion has accelerated is to bring out the impossibility for advanced countries to affront the contradictions on the distribution and employment side, without an intervention that is both financial and structural. The answer requires calibrating a demand-side economic policy with a supply-side sectoral intervention, with high investments under the banner of their “socialisation”, to a top-down intervention on private consumptions. All this cannot be tackled without eradicating capitalist despotism in the labour process (there is no well-being for all, if it does not include working conditions) and without opposing capitalist command over the composition of production (there is no well-being for all, without a different quality of production aimed at satisfying basic social needs). This means radicalising Keynes’s and even Minsky’s notion of the socialisation of investment into that of a social production economy. An epochal transition such as this requires the construction of a social prominence of the working-class movement and of potentially anticapitalist subjectivities. Something not yet on the horizon.