What I was reacting to was Krugman’s idea that what he’s doing is technical and what the other (austerity) side is doing is morality. In my view, and the simple point I was trying to make is, what we’re all doing (neoclassicals, Keynesians, and Marxists) is always some combination of technical and moral theorizing. And, in engaging in a critique of the austerians, we (both Keynesians and Marxists) are making both technical and moral arguments.

Then, of course, we can go one further step. Sure, as I think you’re arguing, both Keynesians and Marxists operate with income-expenditure accounting identities and behavioral assumptions, which are different from those of the austerians. But they’re also different from one another. While Keynesians (whether in an IS-LM or AD-AS world) focus on certain income-expenditure relationships, they do so without any notion of class (hence the “we’re all in this together” idea). What makes a Marxist analysis of macro expenditures different is they’re grounded in a conception of class—so that we can construct the tensions and contradictions accompanying consumption functions based on the expenditure of income associated with the value of labor power, which are different from the consumption and investment expenditures associated with the distributions of surplus-value appropriated from those laborers.

In that sense, Marxian macroeconomics goes one step beyond Keynesian macroeconomics, in both technical and moral senses, in the insistence on the class-specific incomes and expenditures of a capitalist economy.

Right?