Keynes believed in the virtues of finance; he even had an equivocal relationship with the Stock Exchange until he got kicked in the teeth – as often happens even to the most adept. (I disagree here with his biographer Harrod, who claimed that Keynes had financial speculation in his heart.) From Keynes's realistic point of view, the virtue of finance was that it was the beating heart of capitalism. Keynes subverted the old moralist conceptions that, from the Middle Ages to Hilferding, had downplayed and disqualified the hegemony of money in the production of wealth and the reproduction of social order. Against them, Keynes claimed that financial markets functioned as wealth multipliers. Can this theoretical assumption still be valid in a period of economic crisis? 'Of course it can', he asserted from his position in the middle of the crisis that started in the 1920s and assumed gigantic proportions by the end of the same decade. The state will have to intervene in society and reorganize it productively: 'Thus it is to our best advantage to reduce the rate of interest to that point relatively to the schedule of the marginal efficiency of capital at which there is full employment.'

This was how the entire therapeutic cookbook of Keynsianism emerged out of the crisis that kept affecting development. In building a new model of equilibrium whilst being pragmatic and keeping the continuous lack of equilibrium in mind, Keynes proposed to determine a persisting imbalance of state initiative through deficit spending. However, this deficit created new margins for effective demand and aided the development of capitalist dynamics whilst accepting the severe rigidity in workers' wages. This was the way class struggle got reabsorbed into the system of capital.

Keynes's proposal was wholly progressivist. He fully recognized it when, in the negotiations leading to the establishment of the Bretton Woods system of international monetary relations, he faced the opposition of the conservative representatives of Washington who were not willing to allow the currency of reference to forget a real standard, as this standard was the dollar that functioned as a means to organize labour and its international division based on the accumulation of gold in the US Central Bank. For them, deficit spending – which each capitalist and national government could have advanced so as to progressively contain the movements of its national working class, who sought to change society and break the capitalist yoke – needed to be controlled by a capitalist centre, the Komintern of Wall Street. Farewell to the illusion of bancor, Keynes's great invention, an ideal currency based on free exchange that could have given way to the establishment of different equilibriums that referred to the desires of populations and the intensity of the struggle of the organized working class...