The Possibilities of Real Existing Socialism

Abstract

Following their departure from New York, on 20 January 1955, Michal and Adela Kalecki stopped in Britain on their way back to Poland. In Britain he visited Oxford and Cambridge, where he gave a lecture on hyper-inflation, perhaps an unwanted intervention into the arguments around monetary theory and policy raging among Cambridge economists at the time. Those economists were divided into the partisans, led by Richard Kahn, of Keynes’s ‘liquidity preference’ theory of interest and money, in which the rate of interest is the compensation for holding an illiquid asset, and the supporters of Dennis Robertson’s ‘loanable funds’ theory of money, in which the rate of interest is the price that brings the supply and demand for ‘loanable funds,’ that is, money capital or credit, into equilibrium.