Michał Kalecki and Challenging the Norms of Capitalist Theory

Michał Kalecki was a self-taught Polish economist who independently developed many of the same macroeconomic insights as John Maynard Keynes, yet remains far less known today. Working from a Marxian class perspective, Kalecki built models of business cycles, effective demand, and income distribution that challenged the assumption that households, not firms, are the key economic decision-makers.

His most influential essay, "Political Aspects of Full Employment" (1943), argued that business leaders would always resist sustained full employment because high employment strengthens labor's bargaining power. Kalecki saw this as a fundamental political contradiction within capitalism — that the policies most beneficial to workers are the ones capital will most reliably undermine.

In 1943 the self-taught Polish economist Michał Kalecki, who had reached Keynesian conclusions through Marx years earlier, predicted that business would accept deficit spending to end slumps yet resist permanent full employment, because the sack stops disciplining workers when jobs are always waiting New Economic Perspectives. Born in Łódź in June 1899 and dead at 70 by April 1970, he watched the first half of that prediction govern the postwar boom. Federal Reserve staff rebuilt the Phillips curve around his bargaining power mechanism in 2022, and critics answer that rate hikes make central banks take sides in the class struggle Institute for New Economic Thinking. Watch whose account holds when unemployment next becomes policy's tool rather than its failure.