Doug Henwood wrote:
> Jim Devine wrote:
>
> >To me this suggests the possibility of Marx-Keynes syntheses: the
> >holistic analysis of the capitalist mode of production of vol. I
> >left out a lot of the important details of finance and the like,
> >which can be filled in using content from the Keynesian tradition
> >(Minsky, etc.)
>
> Don't forget the great, though fragmentary, stuff on finance in vol.
> 3 of Capital.
The first four chapters of Vol. II seem relatively "finished" -- and are
also among Marx's greatest works. I think I learned more marxism
reading and rereading them than anything else I've ever read. He
takes a tautology, rewrites it tautologically, goes round and round
that circle of tautologies, and with each swing around the block
picks up more of the very feel of living in a capitalist society. At
the end of Chapter 4 he begins moving from a critique of political
economy (and thus of culture and the fundamental dynamic of life
in the capitalist mode of production) to something nearer economics.
And while I agree with Doug about the greatness of those parts of
Vol. 3, I also believe that focusing on them gives a somewhat
distorted view of what Marx was about. In part, he did not finish
Vol. 3 simply because it was in principle unfinishable, and never
will be finished. That is, he was moving away from those aspects
(the fundamental aspects) of capitalism which have never changed
and never will change to those aspects of capitalism which change
endlessly. And that leads us to the next part of Doug's response
to Jim.
> > Of course, the fact that Keynes wanted to save capitalism whereas
> >Marx wanted to destroy it will affect how this "filling in" takes
> >place.
The result of that difference is that what Keynes writes about and
what Marx wrote about simply do not belong to the same realm
of discourse. I trust Jim, Doug, others that Keynes is useful for
describing the contingencies of capitalism, for getting a rough
grasp of what is not ultimately graspable.
> (Keynes also had a different class orientation, of course: he
> >favored the elite technocrats, as part of a liberal version of
> >Fabianism.)
>
> Like I've said before, today's Marxists can use Keynes & Keynesians
> the way Marx used Ricardo and other bourgeois thinkers.
Marxist economists can use Keynes to make sense of what is happening
*today*. (And probably next week.) But that bears no analogy whatsoever
to the use Marx made of Ricardo. And there is very little evidence that
Marx made any use of *later* bourgeois thinkers than Ricardo except
as repositories of important historical and empirical data. He got no
help from bourgeois thinkers (later than the great bourgeois thinkers
of the late 18th and early 19th centuries) in achieving his fundamental
contributions to human thought and action. That is because bourgeois
thought (philosophy, theory of history, etc) was already encountering
what seem to have been its absolute limits in the works of men and
women born no later than the 1770s or 80s. For just one example. You
can see this in the profound shift of tone between Jane Austen on
the one hand, Dickens, George Eliot, James on the other. The former
takes her world so profoundly for granted that she can present it in
the most destructive terms. The latter no longer take their world for
granted but will not leave it. What we can "learn" from them is mostly
what it feels like to live in a world attempting to avoid knowledge of
its own historical limits. The opening sentences of *Tale of Two
Cities* are perhaps the perfect expression of profound bad faith. You
get pretty much the same bad faith in Doug's favorite literary critic,
Harold Bloom and his theory of the anxiety of influence.
> Just because
> Keynes was an anti-Marxist counterrevolutionary doesn't mean you
> can't learn a lot about how finance works by reading him.
I trust Doug on this. We need to know as much as we can about finance
in the world we live in. But we can't learn anything more about
capitalism from Keynes in the sense that Marx learned about capitalism
by reading Ricardo.
>
>
> Also, Keynes got his "monetary theory of production" out of Marx - he
> even used the M-C-M' formula in his notes, though he got it from a
> summary of Marx, not the man himself, whom he dismissed as "out of
> date controversialising."
>
> Doug
