Switching from Friedman to Keynes means more than tinkering with the economy’s operating system, however. The two men had different ideas not just about how capitalism functions, but about what it’s for. Friedman and his ilk saw the market as maximizing individual man’s freedom to pursue his self-interest and thus, since the pursuit of self-interest is simply human nature, maximizing collective well-being. Capitalism was the means and the end.

Keynes, on the other hand, outstanding example of the English gentry that he was, couldn’t countenance money-grubbing as the highest example of virtue. There had to be something more. For Keynes the most dangerous kind of avarice was not trying to make money, but holding it in your pockets for too long. The only way to keep popular well-being high and employment up was to produce and consume more and more—not because it’s in our nature, but because that’s how the system works: it must grow to survive. But someday soon, he predicted, the race will be over, and we can all stop pretending capitalism isn’t a psychotic, Earth-destroying way to live.

In “Grandchildren,” Keynes looked forward to the day when “we shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value.” He continued:

“The love of money as a possession—as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life—will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.”

Capitalism, to Keynes, does not justify itself. “There will be,” he wrote, “ever larger and larger classes and groups of people from whom problems of economic necessity have been practically removed.” But he never identified the mechanism that would end the capitalist accumulation game. Even if we did produce enough stuff to pass the finish line, how would we know? And who’s going to make the rich share, or even just stop taking more? He knew that we could keep growing along these lines for only so long, but he ruled out revolution. Instead, he thought the owners would do the right thing.

Not being Milton Friedman isn’t the same as being right about how the world works. Keynes can be right about growth predictions and business cycles and fiscal policy, but if he is wrong that capitalism will simply end of its own accord, the foundational justification for his entire program crumbles. In that case, all of society is strapped in riding shotgun on the semi-criminal, semi-pathological drive to consume the future in advance, with no virtuous end on the horizon.

Oops.

Much to everyone's surprise, Keynes's grandchildren have become Marxists.

Nicolás Ortega

If the spectrum of traditional economics goes from Friedman to Keynes—from capitalism as an end in itself to capitalism as a means to something beyond it—then what we need now is a critique of what the two of them share, a critique of economics itself. Most such critiques were locked in a trunk and shoved under the bed in the late 1980s and early ’90s, but they are not gone.

The most famous and influential critic of economics remains Marx. Keynes didn’t think highly of the man; in the British economist’s reflections on visiting Soviet Russia in 1925 he declined to name him, instead making pointed references to “avaricious” Jews. But the commie who is not to be named had a different vision for the future of economic development.

Marx’s “immiseration thesis” is an idea that’s pretty easy to summarize: Since capitalists make money from every hour of workers’ labor, they will get increasingly rich over time, while workers won’t because they’re too busy making money for capitalists. A rising tide lifts only big boats; everyone else has to swim for it.

If technology reduced the need for work, Marx figured, workers would simply be made to work longer, harder, more efficiently, or on other things. Technology would create a population of the desperate unemployed who could be put to work making luxury goods, for which there would be an ever growing market—though growing only in terms of money, not in terms of the number of people wealthy enough to buy. Instead of the common good increasing, it’s inequality, exploitation, and misery that accumulate. What workers have been building this whole time is their own subordination, and they’ve been doing a good job.

After decades on the outs even among self-described Marxists, the immiseration thesis is looking empirically strong—especially when compared with Keynes’s vision of increasingly large groups of people graduating from the burden of economic need into the paradise of full-time leisure, or with Friedman’s belief that greater wealth at the top turns into greater wealth for everyone.

And workers weren’t the only thing Marx saw getting used up: “All progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil,” he wrote. “All progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility.” Environmentalism was not a basic tenet of Marx’s thought, but unlike the economists, he understood intuitively that extractive production had natural limits. The only answer for this species on this planet is to scrap the whole form of production, with its workers and capitalists, its cities and rural areas, its big piles of stuff and hollowed-out globe.

As we near 2030—the year that capitalism was meant to be over, the time when we were meant to have advanced and elevated ourselves—the predictions are not rosy. In October 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that global warming is likely to reach 1.5 °C between 2030 and 2052 if temperatures continue to increase at the current rate. In the event we do hit that mark, experts predict a rise of between 26 and 77 centimeters (10 and 30 inches) in sea level, a rapid increase in species extinctions, hundreds of millions more people experiencing water and food shortages, and sustained extreme weather the likes of which the modern human species has never encountered. We have been stockpiling not just wealth, but disasters.

One protest sign at the youth climate strike put it succinctly: “You’ll die of old age. We’ll die of climate change.” Today’s kids never had the chance to believe in a simple progress narrative. The young movement leader Greta Thunberg took the eco--generational message to the United Nations Climate Action Summit: “People are suffering, people are dying, entire ecosystems are collapsing,” she chided. “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”

The younger cohort, the people around the world whom Thunberg represents, have no choice but to establish new standards for social well-being—standards beyond GDP growth. We need to get the carbon out of the atmosphere and the plastics out of the ocean, keep the oil in the ground and the undomesticated species we have left alive. Anything else is a catastrophic failure. Young people seem up to the challenge, and even if the press has occasionally overstated it, the affinity of millennials and Gen Z for socialism is real. It’s more than a decade after the 2008 crash, and in the United States we are in the longest economic expansion in history, yet poll after poll shows left-wing politics enduring within the younger cohort. A YouGov poll found that support for capitalism among Americans under 30 fell from 39% to 30% between 2015 and 2018—14 percentage points below the average and 26 points below the figure for seniors.

The kids recognize that capitalism has been using up human and natural resources rather than building a better society. Rather than a mere reaction to the housing crash and global warming, we can see a deep, emergent understanding. Much to everyone’s surprise, Keynes’s grandchildren have become Marxists.

When Keynes wrote that he looked forward to “the greatest change which has ever occurred in the material environment of life for human beings in the aggregate,” he meant us, now. And it looks as if he was right at least in one sense. The fate of our species—and many other species, for that matter—hangs in the balance.

Though Keynes’ bottom line now seems fanciful, there are ways in which his 1930 prediction wasn’t totally off. Besides getting the growth rate more or less right, Keynes thought we would be the generational cohort to end capitalism. The system was not supposed to be sustainable for even 500 years. At a certain level of technological development and capital accumulation, capitalism becomes not merely exploitative or even genocidal (achievements long registered); it becomes difficult to reconcile with humanity itself.

Like football, where the increasing size and strength of the players has made brain damage almost certain at the highest levels of the game, capitalist production has become an objective hazard for the entirety of human society.

One way or another, it’s a good bet that the workforce of 2030 is the last true cohort that market capitalism gets. It’s hard to say what comes next, but it has to happen pretty soon. The grandchildren he spoke of have been here for a while now. Whether or not we manage to understand what it means in advance, the new is here.

Malcolm Harris is a writer and editor based in Philadelphia, and the author of Kids These Days and the forthcoming Shit Is Fucked Up and Bullshit.