46 SOCIAL SCIENTIST constraint of the first world as well as the supply constraint of the third world. This view, which was put forward somewhat earlier by Lord Kahn in an address to the American Economic Association, has been justifiably labelled 'Global Keynesianism'. Not only does it see the recession and unemployment prevalent in the first world in essentially Keynesian terms, but is even informed by what one may call a Keynesian Weltanschauung on economic matters. Let me explain. Keynesianism was born in the midst of the Great Depiession. The Depression meant unemployment for workers and unutilised capacity and loss of profits for capitalists. Both classes therefore stood to gain from an overcoming of the Depression. What prevented such overcoming according to Keynes was the dead-weight of false theories and wrong ideas. The resolution of the crisis awaited only the formulation of a suitably intelligent scheme for it. Keynesianism looks at every crisis in this manner, through the prism of the 1930's crisis; i.e. it believes that since every slide-back from full employment affects all groups adversely, the overcoming of the crisis is a non-zero sum game, and hence there is an essential underlying 'harmony-of-interests' of all groups in overcoming a crisis. All that is required is the formulation of an appropriate, intelligently conceived scheme for such overcoming. It is in the realm of ideas rather than in the world of real material interests that obstacles to overcoming a crisis lie. What this view, which is anchored basically in G.E. Moore's ideas floating around in Cambridge during Keynes' formative years,3 glosses over is the fact that crises differ considerably in their texture, and that not all crises are amenable to resolution without adversely affecting the immediate material interests of particular groups. Where the government's printing money to employ workers, for digging holes in the ground and then filling them up, constitutes a way out of the crisis, no immediate material interests perhaps are trodden upon; but such remedies do not always suffice. Where immediate material interests are at stake to talk of Harmony-of-interests' is either simply wrong or at best Utopian. The problem with "Global Keynesianism' of the Brandt Commission variety however which sees a 'harmony-of-interests' between the first and the third worlds is not simply that it is Utopian, but more importantly that it misreads the nature of the current capitalist crisis. It looks at the current crisis facing the advanced capitalist countries as if it is simply a recession of the Keynesian kind. But if this was the case, then governments in these countries, by now well-schooled in Keynesian demand management, would have taken steps to overcome the crisis and they would have done so in ways far more attractive to the capitalists than transferring resources cheap to the third world. The very fact that we see a crisis therefore is precisely because what we see is not a crisis of the Keynesian variety. The basic problem facing the advanced capitalist world is that a ^ return in a sustained roanner to levels of activity which they experienced