Re: Globalization and its Discontents

[Ted Winslow <egwinslow@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Michael wrote:

> Is there any evidence that Keynes read Marx at all?  I know he read
> McCracken to get his M-C-M'.  I would assume that Sraffa would have
> encouraged him to read Marx, but I have never seen anything in Keynes to
> suggest he really grappled with Capital.

I don't think Keynes ever made a serious attempt to read Capital.  Whatever
reading of it he did do wasn't done with the "good will" he requested from
his own readers.  He wrote the following to George Bernard Shaw in December
1934:

"My feelings about Das Kapital are the same as my feelings about the Koran.
I know that it is historically important and I know that many people, not
all of whom are idiots, find it a sort of Rock of Ages and containing
inspiration.  Yet when I look into it, it is to me inexplicable that it can
have this effect.  Its dreary, out-of-date, academic controversialising
seems so extraordinarily unsuitable for the purpose.  But then, as I have
said, I feel just the same about the Koran.  How could either of these books
carry fire and sword round half the world?  It beats me.  Clearly there is
some defect in my understanding.  Do you believe both Das Kapital and the
Koran?  Or only Das Kapital?  But whatever the sociological value of the
latter, I am sure that its contemporary economic value (apart from
occasional but inconstructive and discontinuous flashes of insight) is nil.
Will you promise to read it again, if I do?" (XXVIII, p. 38)

In a subsequent letter a month latter containing the passage about knocking
away the "Ricardian foundations of Marxism" he claims to have

"made another shot at old K.M. last week, reading the Marx-Engels
correspondence just published, without making much progress.  I prefer
Engels of the two.  I can see that they invented a certain method of
carrying on and a vile manner of writing, both of which their successors
have maintained with fidelity.  But if you tell me that they discovered a
clue to the economic riddle, still I am beaten - I can discover nothing but
out-of-date controversialising." (XXVIII, p. 42)

So the correspondences between Keynes and Marx don't derive from Keynes's
reading of Marx.  In so far as they derive from reading (as opposed say to
simply astutely observing the actual character of capitalism), they derive
from the common tradition in thought which both share.  Aristotle, for
instance, is a common source both for their idea of "political economy" as a
moral science, of the "economic problem" as subsidiary to "our real problems
- the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behaviour and
religion" (IX, p. xviii) "meaning by 'religion' one's attitude towards
oneself and the ultimate" (X, p. 436), and of avarice as psychopathology.

Marshall was a more careful and insightful reader of Marx than Keynes.
Moreover, Marshall, as Keynes himself points out in his biographical essay,
read and was importantly influenced by Kant and Hegel.  For these reasons
Marx's ideas were to some extent available to Keynes through Marshall.

Marshall was much more favorable than Keynes to Marx's ideas about the "The
Future of the Working Classes" (Marshall, Memorials of Alfred Marshall, pp.
101-18).  In this essay, he implicitly adopts Marx's view of labour in
capitalism as "alienated labour", of

"that darker scene which the lot if unskilled labour presents.  Let us look
at those vast masses of men who, after long hours of hard and unintellectual
toil, are wont to return to their narrow homes with bodies exhausted and
with minds dull and sluggish.  That men do habitually sustain hard corporeal
work for eight, ten or twelve hours a day, is a fact so familiar to us that
we scarcely realize the extent to which it governs the moral and mental
history of the world; we scarcely realize how subtle, all-pervading and
powerful may be the effect of the work of man's body in dwarfing the growth
of the man." (Memorials, pp. 105-6)

In Industry and Trade (p. 774), Marshall points approvingly to Marx's
quotation in Capital of the the Greek poet Antipater in support of the idea
that in a rational community technical progress would be used to reduce the
working day, improve the nature of work and in these and other ways
facilitate full human development.

In this passage, Marx also quotes Aristotle and calls him "the greatest
thinker of antiquity".

"'If,' dreamed Aristotle, the greatest thinker of antiquity, 'if every tool,
when summoned, or even of its own accord, could do the work that befits it,
just as the creations of Daedalus moved of themselves, or the tripods of
Hephaestos went of their own accord to their sacred work, if the weavers'
shuttles were to weave of themselves, then there would be no need either of
apprentices for the master workers, or of slaves for the lords.' And
Antipater, a Greek poet of the time of Cicero, hailed the invention of the
water-wheel for grinding corn, an invention that is the elementary form of
all machinery, as the giver of freedom to female slaves, and the bringer
back of the golden age. Oh those heathens! They understood nothing of
political economy and Christianity, as the learned Bastiat discovered, and
before him the still wiser MacCulloch. have discovered. They did not, for
example, comprehend that machinery is the surest means of lengthening the
working-day. They may perhaps excused the slavery of one person as a means
to the full human development of another. But they lacked the specifically
Christian qualities which would have enable them to preach the slavery of
the masses in order that a few crude and half-educated parvenus might become
'eminent spinners,' 'extensive sausage-makers,' and 'influential shoe-black
dealers'."  (Capital, vol. 1, pp. 532-3)

For Marshall as for Marx "the growth of a man's mind", "his spiritual
cultivation", is "the end of life" and "material wealth, houses and horses,
carpets and French cookery" are "merely means" (Memorials, p. 117).

"Time of labour, even if exchange value is eliminated, always remains the
creative substance of wealth and the measure of the cost of its production.
But free time, disposable time, is wealth itself, partly for the enjoyment
of the product, partly for free activity which - unlike labour - is not
determined by a compelling extraneous purpose which must be fulfilled, and
the fulfilment of which is regarded as a natural necessity or a social duty,
according to one's inclination.
    "It is self-evident that if time of labour is reduced to a normal length
and, furthermore, labour is no longer performed for someone else, but for
myself, and, at the same time, the social contradictions between master and
men, etc., being abolished, it acquires a quite different, a free character,
it becomes real social labour, and finally the basis of disposable time -
the time of labour of a man who has also disposable time, must be of a much
higher quality than that of the beast of burden." (Marx, Theories of Surplus
Value, Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 32,  pp. 301-2)

"The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based,
appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by
large-scale industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased
to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to
be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of
use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for
the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for
the development of the general powers of the human head. With that,
production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material
production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis. The
free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of
necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather 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." (Marx,
Grundrisse, pp. 705-6)

"The saving of labour time [is] equal to an increase of free time, i.e. time
for the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts back upon
the productive power of labour as itself the greatest productive power. From
the standpoint of the direct production process it can be regarded as the
production of fixed capital, this fixed capital being man himself. It goes
without saying, by the way, that direct labour time itself cannot remain in
the abstract antithesis to free time in which it appears from the
perspective of bourgeois economy. Labour cannot become play, as Fourier
would like, although it remains his great contribution to have expressed the
suspension not of distribution, but of the mode of production itself, in a
higher form, as the ultimate object. Free time - which is both idle time and
time for higher activity - has naturally transformed its possessor into a
different subject, and he then enters into the direct production process as
this different subject." (Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 711-2)

Ted