One of the interesting sessions at last weekend’s Historical Materialism conference (apart from my session, of course) was one on the work of Suzanne de Brunhoff. Brunhoff was a Marxist economist from the 1970s onwards who specialised in Marx’s theory of money and applying it to the conditions of modern capitalism. She died this year. There is no space to deal with her contributions here. What I want to take up from the session was a presentation by Maria Ivanova of Goldsmiths University, London. Ivanova made some key observations about Marx’s theory of money, but also of Keynes. She pointed out that, in his Treatise on Money written in 1930 at the start of the Great Depression, Keynes argued that central banks would have to intervene with what we now call ‘unconventional monetary policies’ designed to lower the cost of borrowing and raise sufficient liquidity for investment. Just trying…
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Economic Activity 