Not Keynesianism Or Monetarism; Its About Capitalism
Prof Kumar David
Chapter 5: “Keynesianism and Monetarism”
Masters of the Universe by Daniel Steadman Jones. Princeton University Press, 2011.
Last week I reviewed, well took the chance to get across my views in the guise of a review, Steadman’s book. Actually I focussed on the first four chapters that tell the story of the rise of neoliberalism as an ideology and a political doctrine from the 1930s to the end of the 1960s. I dealt with the transition chapter, Chapter 5, “Keynesianism and Monetarism”, very lightly and entirely omitted consideration of the final two chapters and the epilogue because they pertain to the post-1970 period when IMF led neoliberal economics came into prominence foreshadowing the Regan-Thatcher dark ages. It will be useful to repeat a just one point from last week: neoliberalism, in the first phase when ideas were created and consolidated, was an ideology, a philosophical world view supporting individualism against all forms of collectivism. It was only afterwards, after 1970, that it became something more crass, materialist and politically reactionary; it became neoliberal economics.
I have decided on second thoughts that the Keynesianism-Monetarism chapter deserves attention, not only for its intrinsic value (the book on the whole, especially chapters 1 to 4, is excellent) but also because this historical debate has a bearing on monetary and economic policy in the US, Europe and Japan right now as global capitalism sputters unsuccessfully to recover from the post-2008 prolonged recession or New Depression.
‘Noon Tide Toll’
Prof. Charles Sarvan
Romesh Gunesekera has several books to his credit including ‘Reef’ which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and has been translated into several languages, including Chinese. Not many other Sri Lankan, English-language, literary texts have received such reader and critical attention.
‘Noon Tide Toll’ (hereafter NTT) consists of short stories, vignettes, divided into North and South. The narrator, Vasantha, retired from a state corporation at the age of fifty-five; bought a van and now drives passengers, visitors or residents, all over the Island. Making Vasantha a van-driver enables the author to bring in different individuals set in different situations and locations. Being “merely” a driver, paid to be of service, no notice is taken of him but Vasantha is a quiet, alert and perceptive student of individuals and situations, even as he is sensitive and responsive to landscape and nature. Seeing while politely pretending not to look; discretely observing in the rear-view mirror, he is the lens through which we glimpse and understand the characters, their relationship, values and aims. With and through him we surmise their past, evaluate their present, and wonder about their future.
An islanded persona, Vasantha is literally with his passengers but not of them: see in this context, Frank O’Connor, ‘The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story’. With a degree of urgency, he says he must write before “I forget what has happened, what I saw, what I thought, what I believed on all those journeys north and south. The hopes, the aspirations, the secret guilt embedded in our shaken lives” (last page of NTT): cf. Sivanandan’s ‘When Memory Dies’. Vasantha’s father was a self-taught revolutionary who had worked as a barefooted caddie at the expensive, and therefore exclusive, Golf Club. Vasantha too, though lacking in formal education, is an autodidact with a knowledge that his passengers, “superior” in income and class, don’t suspect, much less possess. (Gunesekera employs a similar devise in ‘Reef’ where the narrator is a village boy employed to be a servant to a man from a high, feudal, family. The servant proves to be more resourceful than the master: see, “‘Reef’: a Chekhovian awareness and mood” in Sarvan, ‘Sri Lanka: Literary Essays & Sketches’.)
