On the role of finance in post-Keynesian and Marxist macroeconomics

Blecker and Setterfield’s outstanding Heterodox Macroeconomics book covers, as its subtitle suggests, a lot of ground on “models of demand, distribution and growth”, but issues of finance are largely absent. This is symptomatic of the state of heterodox macroeconomics, which has a developed common framework for the analysis of distribution and growth, but not for finance. The paper takes this as a starting point for some reflections on the role of finance in post-Keynesian (PK) and Marxist approaches. In PKE, financial factors play a constitutive role and determine the equilibrium values of key macroeconomic variables. Hyman Minsky’s work puts finance at the heart of PK business cycle theory. Marxist macroeconomics often treats finance as subordinate to real (productive) processes or not at all. We consider three episodes of how PK-Marxist debates played out: the Woytinsky-Hilferding debate of the 1930s, the debate on heterodox explanations of business cycles and the debate on financialisation. In these, the relation between PK and Marxism was confrontational, largely non-interactive and productive, respectively. The paper concludes that heterodox macroeconomics lacks an effective framework for a productive articulation of the different views on the role of finance.