Introduction to the Text “John Maynard Keynes and the Capitalist Theory of State in 1929”

Abstract

This issue offers a translation, unpublished in Portuguese, of “John M. Keynes e a teoria capitalista do Estado em 1929”, an important essay by Antonio Negri originally published in 1968. In order to present it to the Portuguese-speaking reader, I intend first of all to highlight the place of this essay within the author’s philosophical path, considering especially the context of his return to philosophical production after the period that he himself called “propaedeutics to class struggle” and his affiliation to the so-called “Italian workerism”. Then, I’m going to do some general considerations about Negri’s interpretation of Keynes’s work, emphasizing the so-called “political intuition” manifested by the British economist in relation to the new position of the working class in the post-war economic scenario and the development of that intuition in a systematic theoretical body. Finally, I hope to situate within a certain theoretical-political trajectory of the 1960s both Negri’s thesis on the emergence of the welfare state from Keynesian theory and the affirmation of a new historical landmark in capitalist and struggle developments of classes from 1917-1929, and also to indicate the appearance of a further milestone of these developments in the events that occurred in 1968.