Re: Globalization and its Discontents

["Kazuhiro Kurose" <kurose@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> 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  Its dreary, out-of-date, academic controversialising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 out-of-date controversialising."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)

After saying so, Keynes subsequently said as follows.
"To understand my state of mind, however, you have to know that I believe myself to be writing a book on economic
theory, which will largely revolutionise ... the way the world thinks about economic problem."

What Keynes meant is that he had already elaborated the principle of effective demand. Seen from these letter, I think,
he had read only the first volume of Das Kapital, and in particular he had never read or known the essence of the third
volume. Because the germination of principle of effective demand can be found here and there in the third volume. So I
think that the estimation of Marx may be changed if he read the third volume.

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  Kazuhiro Kurose
  Graduate School of Economics and Business
  Administration, Hokkaido University
  Kita 9 Nishi 7, Kita-Ku, Sapporo, Japan
  060-0809
    TEL: +81-11-716-2111 ex:2786
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