[was: RE: [PEN-L] Gary Trudeau, Iraq and Nader]
I said:
> there is a political perspective out there that shares more with
> Keynes than with Marx. Do we call it "reformism"?
Ted Winslow writes: >As I've claimed before, I think this misinterprets Keynes. The final
part of "The End of Laissez-Faire" and pretty much the whole of
"Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" contemplate a radical
transformation of capitalism on the same ethical and psychological
grounds as Marx, namely, the domination of capitalist motivation by "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."<
I've read the passages that you posted in a separate message before. But thanks for them.
I don't know if the word "reformism" is very useful (thus my quotation marks), so I'll drop it.
It may be that there are shared elements in Marx's and Keynes' abstract ethical and psychological conceptions, but the fact that their political-economic conceptions were so different suggests that it's wrong to equate the two thinkers. Two people can share abstract principles (e.g., Marx and Aristotle) while disagreeing profoundly (e.g., the issue of slavery). (Oh no! I've opened the Aristotle-on-slavery can of worms! Some pedant will argue that Ari really _didn't_ support slavery if you read him carefully, from the right philosophical perspective, and in the original Greek. Please humor me. Please.)
I'd say that on the _political-economic_ level (what I think is the relevant level), there are at least three differences between Marx and Keynes:
(1) M believed in changing capitalism by replacing it with a democratic and collectivist mode of production, whereas K was much more of a meliorist. The latter had moved leftward toward the Fabian society in his politics during the 1930s, in response to a period when alternatives to liberal capitalism (the USSR mode of production (bureaucratic socialism), fascism) were becoming extremely popular. He aimed to reform capitalism as much as possible but to save as much of the "good stuff" (not his phrase) as possible. It's not so wrong to say that K wanted to reform capitalism in order to save it.
(2) Whereas K wanted to get rid of the rentiers (if necessary), M wanted to get rid of the entire capitalist class. K seems akin to Saint-Simon, who included the industrial capitalists as part of the "producers" (along with the normally-defined working class) and wanted to replace the non-producers (rentiers, aristocrats, etc.) with experts. K usually is more moderate though, wanting to subordinate "speculation" to "industry" rather than getting rid of speculation altogether. On the other hand, M wanted to subordinate the experts to democratic control by the working class.
Put another way, whereas K thought that (maybe) interest income could be driven to zero, M wanted to get rid of surplus-value (industrial and commercial profit, interest, land-rent). K's attitude toward interest seems akin to Henry George's attitude toward land-rent: capitalism can be improved by getting rid of it.
(3) Whereas K wanted a greater amount of collectivism (state control over the economic process), Marx also wanted to have strong democratic control over the state (so that eventually it would "wither away," abolishing the distinction between the people and the state). It should be noted that K seems to have praised German capitalism in the 1936 introduction to the German translation of the GENERAL THEORY. This seems to reflect his valuation of issues of "efficiency" over those of democracy. Here's the relevant quote:
>The theory of aggregated production, which is the point of the following book, nevertheless can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state [eines totalen Staates] than the theory of production and distribution of a given production put forth under conditions of free competition and a large degree of laissez-faire. < (from http://www.blancmange.net/tmh/articles/foregt.html)
That said, I really admire K's economics. I've learned more from him than from the vast majority of economists. Among other things he allowed the filling of a lot of holes in M's economics.
JD