Re: K vs. M

[Ted Winslow <egwinslow@xxxxxxxxxx>]

ken hanly wrote:

> Surely Keynes is a hopeless Idealist. He talks of people changing their
> motivations,getting rid of certain motivational features of capitalism
> such
> as the love of money. changing moral values and ideas,  not changing
> the
> relations of production that is getting rid of the underlying
> foundations
> for those values by overthrowing the capitalist system. He is a
> preacher not
> a revolutionary. There is not a word about class struggle or the need
> to
> socialise the means of production, no explanation of the love of money
> in
> terms of the structure of capitalism itself. Ideas are not the
> fundamental
> determinant of radical change but are primarily determined by the class
> struggle itself at least according to Marx as I understand him. The
> two are
> worlds apart. Certainly one can see family resemblances in what Keynes
> has
> to say about money and what Marx says in the Manuscripts but they
> result
> from quite different and conflicting frameworks. Keynes doesnt even
> mention
> relations of production.

Even is this is true it doesn't answer my point which was that Keynes's
claims can't be reasonably identified with a "liberalism" that sees no
reason to change "the essential characteristic of capitalism."

Keynes and Marx are worlds apart, as I've also pointed out previously,
on the degree to which most people are assumed able to achieve the
development required for the actualization and functioning of the
"ideal republic of the imagination."  On the nature of the ideal
republic that rational self-consciousness would create, however,
they're largely in agreement.

The passages I recently quoted from Marx demonstrate this i.e. Marx
identifies the "true realm of freedom" with "the development of human
powers as an end in itself", with "the general reduction of the
necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the
artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time
set free, and with the means created, for all of them."  This
development then makes possible the activities of creating and
appropriating beauty and truth ("artistic" and "scientific" values)
within relations of mutual recognition that constitute this realm. a
realm where, as Keynes puts it, individuals "value ends above means and
prefer the good to the useful" and "are capable of taking direct
enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do
they spin."  This "production" involves "relations" as an essential
aspect.  In general, capitalist relations of production necessarily
involve capitalist ethical ideas, i.e. ideas about good relations, so
it would be self-contradictory to assume the continuance of capitalist
relations of production having rid ourselves of capitalist ethical
ideas.

Keynes assumes the time (15 hours a week) spent in the realm of
necessity will continue to be greater than would be required by a fully
rational self-consciousness because of the strength and tenacity of
"the old Adam in us" i.e. of the strength and tenacity of the
constitutionally rooted instinctual barriers to the development of
fully rational self-consciousness.  This also explains his acceptance
of other less the ideal arrangements as necessary long into the future.
 It's what he means by the "Tolstoy problem" in the way of actualizing
ideal arrangements.  in general, it's his estimation of the strength
and tenacity of these barriers that makes him worlds apart from Marx
(though, at least so far as human nature is concerned, he, like Marx,
adopted an ontology of internal relations).  It's not clear to me how
this makes him a "hopeless idealist."

If the idea about the role of "ideas" in history that you're
attributing to Marx excludes the idea that human history is the history
of the development of rational self-consciousness which when fully
developed will self-consciously actualize the idea of an ideal republic
this self-consciousness will ground, then I think the interpretation is
mistaken.  It's inconsistent with the passages to which I've just
pointed and with many others e.g. with the following on forces and
relations of production as "the power of knowedge, objectified."

"Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric
telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human
industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will
over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of
the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge,
objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree
general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and
to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life
itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been
transformed in accordance with it. To what degree the powers of social
production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but
also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process."
Grundrisse pp. 705-6

"According to Hodgskin, circulating capital is nothing but the
juxtaposition of the different kinds of social labour (coexisting
labour) and accumulation is nothing but the amassing of the productive
powers of social labour, so that the accumulation of the skill and
knowledge (scientific power) of the workers themselves is the chief
form of accumulation, and infinitely more important than the
accumulation - which goes hand in hand with it and merely represents it
- of the existing objective conditions of this accumulated activity.
These objective conditions are only nominally accumulated and must be
constantly produced anew and consumed anew.

"... productive capital and skilled labour are [...] one." "Capital and
a labouring population are precisely synonymous" ([Hodgskin, Labour
Defended against the Claims of Capital, London, 1825,] p 33.

       "These are simply further elaborations of Galiani's thesis:

       "... The real wealth ... is man" (Della Moneta, Parte Moderna, t. III,
p. 229).

       "The whole objective world, the 'world of commodities', vanishes here
as a mere aspect, as the merely passing activity, constantly performed
anew, of socially producing men.  Compare this 'idealism' with the
crude, material fetishism into which the Ricardian theory develops in
the writings 'of this incredible cobbler', McCulloch, where not only
the difference between man and animal disappears but even the
difference between  a living organism and an inanimate object.  And
then let them say that as against the lofty idealism of bourgeois
political economy, the proletarian opposition has been preaching a
crude materialism directed exclusively towards the satisfaction of
coarse appetites." pp. 266-7 Theories of Surplus Value Part III

Ted