Doug Henwood quoted Keynes as follows:
>
> "We were not aware that civilisation was a thin and precarious crust
> erected by the personality and will of a very few, and only
> maintained by rules and conventions skilfully put across and
> guilefully preserved. We had no respect for traditional wisdom or the
> restraints of custom. We lacked reverence..." - JMK, "My Early
> Beliefs"
>
> "How can I accept a doctrine [Marxism] which sets up as its
> bible...an obsolete economic textbook which I know to be not only
> scientifically erroneous but without interest or application for the
> modern world? How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to
> the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and the
> intelligentsia who, with whatever faults, are the quality in life and
> surely carry the seeds of all human advancement? Even if we need a
> religion how can we find it in the turbid rubbish of the Red
> bookshops? It is hard for an educated, decent, intelligent son of
> western Europe to find his ideals here, unless he has first suffered
> some strange and horrid process of conversion which has changed all
> his values." - JMK, CW IX, p. 258.
>
These passages point to the real basis of the difference between Keynes and
Marx.
As I've tried to show in previous posts, Keynes's view of the ideal republic
was very close to Marx's (among other reasons, because it was rooted in a
complex way in the same philosophic tradition). "The republic of my
imagination," he once said, "lies on the extreme left of celestial space."
Collected Writings (CW) IX, p. 309
He was not, however, much of a reader of Marx (and when he did read him, he
did not read with good will). Marshall, in fact, was a much more astute
reader of Marx than Keynes.
Keynes had two central objections to what he took to be Marx's idea of how
the ideal could be made actual.
One was rooted in his "dialectical" view of interdependence. Where
interdependence is dialectical, i.e. where relations are "internal", it will
not be possible to reach reasonable conclusions about long run consequences
including about the long run consequences of radical changes in existing
arrangements. The only thing we can know for certain about the long-run is
that in it we are all dead. This (from as early as a 1904 undergraduate
essay on the topic) was one aspect of what he took to be the defensible in
Burke's conservatism.
Perhaps he was wrong about this. It may be possible rationally to justify
"faith in the Big One". Many accounts of the ultimate crisis and its
consequences read, however, like the Book of Revelation.
On the other hand and as Doug's quotations show, he thought the working
class was innately incapable of the kind of development required for life in
the ideal republic. They were, therefore, incapable of playing the role of
the "universal class". Also, this limitation made the republic of the
imagination impracticable even in the very long run.
Here it is Keynes who is being insufficiently dialectical. He ignores the
possibility that developed capacities are the outcome of fetters present in
existing social relations. Until the end of his life, he uncritically held
that "chromosomes" were the main determinant of an individual's capacity for
development to universality.
As I also pointed out before, Marx (e.g. in the passage from The Holy
Family) locates the capacity of the members of the working class to become
the universal class in the developmental possibilities inherent in their
location within the internal social relations that define capitalism.
The inexorable operation of the law of value will, in the long run, both
produce conditions of extreme alienation for the members of the working
class and create in them the capacity to become the architects and makers of
a new society from which the ultimate fetters to universal development have
been removed.
He nowhere explains, however, how the premise that "in the fully-formed
proletariat the abstraction of all humanity, even of the semblance of
humanity, is practically complete" is consistent with the conclusion that
the fully-formed proletariat will also have developed the degree of rational
self-consciousness required for it to play the role of the "universal
class".
Keynes, by the way, frequently points to Hayek's arguments as extreme
examples of "Bedlamite economics", i.e. of the Ricardian vice. For
instance, he says of Hayek's book *Prices and Production* that
"The book, as it stands, seems to me to be one of the most frightful muddles
I have ever read, with scarcely a sound proposition in it beginning with
page 45, and yet it remains a book of some interest which is likely to leave
its mark on the mind of the reader. It is an extraordinary example of how,
starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in Bedlam."
(XII, p. 252)
The debate as to whether a super calculating machine can solve the Bedlamite
problem as well as individual calculating machines integrated through
markets is not a debate about the practicability of the ideal republic of
either Marx or Keynes.
Ted Winslow
--
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