Comparing Marx to Keynes is like comparing apples to oranges. I can
understand why there would be confusion around this question on a mailing
list focused on economic questions per se. But Marx's writings on economics
were part of a more holistic body of work that attempted to understand the
entire relationship of social, economic and political institutions of class
society so as to abolish them. Keynes's interest was much more narrow.
Looking at the workings of the bourgeois economy during the depression, he
tried to understand what mechanisms were at work and how to correct them.
Just to repeat a point I've made numerous times here, after Marx completed
Capital, he turned his attention to revolutionary politics, specifically
trying to understand what class forces could abolish feudalism where it
still persisted, and based on that what openings existed for the working
class in the fight for socialism. If your knowledge of Marx rests on
Capital, and if your interest in that work is as some kind of heuristic for
understanding finance, capital flows, etc., then you are giving Marx short
shrift. Works like the 18th Brumaire, Class Struggles in France and
hundreds of journalistic pieces on India, China, Poland, Ireland, etc. are
just as important as his economic writings. One thread in his body of work
sheds light on the other.
Furthermore, some of the great Marxist thinkers of the 20th century never
wrote about the topics found in Capital. Mariategui, CLR James, and
Gramsci--three of the "muses" of the Marxism mailing list--never wrote
about value theory, etc. They wrote about society, politics and history.
One of the unfortunate legacies of the "academic turn" in Marxism is that
it fragments his thought into compartments. You can even find this in
mailing lists, where Progressive Sociologists and Progressive Economists
live in separate sections of cyberspace. In order to remedy this
fragmentation and to bring to bear the full power of Marx's method, it will
be necessary to reconstruct a working-class revolutionary movement. That
movement will serve as a pole of attraction to the intelligentsia, who will
rapidly find questions of French philosophy much less interesting than they
had in the past.
Louis Proyect
(The Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org)
