Re: Keynes and Marx

[Carlos Eduardo Rebello <crebello@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Date: Wed, 09 Feb 2000 15:51:44 +1300
> From: Philip L Ferguson <PLF13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: Re: Keynes and Marx

> PS: I few months ago I went to a seminar in the Department of Management
> Studies here. One of our subscribers, who's doing her PhD there, was
> presenting a departmental seminar on the subject of tertiary restructuring.
> She spent some time on Hayek and Keynes and had an interesting quote from
> Keynes, in which he made it absolutely clear that he was on the side of
> capital against labour and his ideas were about saving the day for capital.

Yes, Phil, and the quote was undoubtely from Keynes's 1925 adress to the
Liberal Party at the Liberal Sunday School (Keynes tried a lot to rescue
the old Liberal Party -and Lloyd George - from political oblivion after
the rise of Labour), published under the title "I'm I a Liberal?".
Keynes ponders about his political sympathies, the sorry state of the
liberals and says: "Ought I, then, to join the Labour Party? [...]
Looked at closer, there are great difficulties. To begin with, it is a
class party, and the class is not my class. If I am going to pursue
sectional interests at all, I will pursue my own. When it comes to the
class struggle as such, my local and personal patriotisms, like those of
everyone else, except some unpleasant zealous ones [No doubt Bolshevik
sympathizers, of which at the time there were a few in Keynes's *alma
mater* at the King's College]  are attached to my own surroundings. I
can be influenced by what seems to me to be Justice and good sense; but
the *Class* war will find me on the side of the educated *bourgeoisie*"
(*Essays in Persuasion*, WW Norton, NYC 1963, reprint, pg.324)

Nonethless...As some people here are aware, my PhD thesis was about
Keynes and his socio-political underpinnings, and in it I had a lot of
things to say about him, not all of them accusatory. I find Mattck's
account of Keynes not very useful, in that he limits himself to find
that Keynes was a reactionary - which he was, of course, but since when
has this precluded serious Marxist thinkers from profitting from what is
useful in bourgeois science? I believe that Keynes had, in his
economics, some useful things to supplement Marx: 1st. , that in an
epoch of Imperialism (although he does not use that term, of course),
the hub of capitalist capital accumulation is centered around *Finance*,
and that the central variable in this overall process is the setting of
a complex of *interest rates* that reflect, not an equilibrium between
savings and investment (that equilibrium is an accounting fiction), but
the general *expectations* of the capitalist class towards various
business ventures.

2nd, such expectations tend to be self-fulfilling, in that the
investments actually realized actually create the markets for a myriad
of others; but when, for some reason, confidence fails, the whole of the
economy can enter into a self-fulfilling depression related to
decreasing expectations.

Keynes's theory, in fact, is a theory of capitalist accumulation from
the point of view of *the actual actions of the bourgeoisie as a
collection of individuals*, something that was lacking, in my view, in
Marx, that still centered on the analysis of the process of production
as such and set to analyze the organization of capitalist production as
a whole mainly as from the abstract viewpoint of a counterfactual
"proportionate" capitalist economy that does not exist, of course, but
that he followers, less diatecticians than him, thought exist, something
with spwned a whole ill-guided controversy about the Bk.2 reproduction
schemes from which little useful can be rescued.

If I'm wrong, I prefer to be wrong, perhaps, with Lenin and Trotsky, who
had read Keynes's *Economic Consequences of the peace* and that
considered him - although hopelessly a "petty-bourgeois pacifist"
(Lenin)- still a worthy opponent.

Finally, on the quote above: we Marxists could exploit it against Keynes
himself, when we consider that the revolutionary necessity of the
proletariat is to make its struggle not a question of its "sectional"
interest, but of the interest of all non-bourgeois classes as a whole;
something for which - at about the same time time Keynes spoke - Gramsci
coined, in prison, the term "Historical Bloc".

Carlos Rebello




>
> In the end the reason why what subsequently got called 'Keynesianism'
> 'worked' had little to do with the merits of the ideas themselves and
> everything to do with WW2 and the defeat of the working class.  It was
> these which provided the basis for such a dynamic new round of accumulation.
>