The case of the Soviet Union does not demonstrate the validity of Narayan’s 1936 solution to the problem of simultaneous overproduction and underconsumption. If it demonstrated a solution to the problem at all, it did not demonstrate a desirable one.

John Maynard Keynes attributed the problem to a different set of causes. He proposed a different cure. At a practical level, Keynes consciously sought an alternative to Marx. He wanted to find ways to stabilize an economy and to promote social justice (at least to a limited extent) without major changes in the ownership of the means of production. At a theoretical level, he did not need to add anything to the criticisms of Marxian theory that had already been written by others. Keynes was initiated into the profession in the heart of an economic orthodoxy that had already decided, beginning at the first publication of Capital and continuing forward from there, that Marxism was more metaphysics than science. His father John Nevile Keynes was a professor of economics; he studied economics at Cambridge under Alfred Marshall; he became editor of the Economic Journal, the leading British academic journal in the field. His theoretical concerns were those of a community of scholars that had already decided that Marx was wrong.

Keynes could take it to be assumed in his milieu that the sort of thing he was doing was more scientific than anything Marxists were doing. That put Gandhi two down.

The passage I quoted at length above from Jayaprakash Narayan was taken from a chapter in Narayan’s book Why Socialism? which was written as a refutation of Gandhi. Narayan there argued that Gandhi’s approach was merely ethical and religious, which was equivalent to saying that it did not provide valid explanations of the cause and effect relationships that determine what happens in the world. Narayan contrasts Marxism with Gandhian thought by claiming that Marx was scientific. Exhibit A of Narayan’s proof that Marx was scientific and Gandhi was not is in the passage I quoted. Marx could explain simultaneous overproduction and underconsumption. Gandhi could not. Narayan attributed to Gandhi the naïve view that the cause of unemployment was machinery. The true cause, had been proven by Marx (according to Narayan) to be the exploitation of labor rooted in the private ownership of the means of production. If the weight of opinion of the majority of the economics profession, including Keynes, was that orthodox economics is more scientific than Marx, and if Marx is more scientific than Gandhi, that makes orthodox economics very much more scientific than Gandhi. Gandhi was two down.