I just found something on Jerry Levy's list that may shed some light on
Keen's thinking:
Jerry Levy:
And, by the way, the revolution will come! And, I hope that the members of
this list will live long enough to see that day. Indeed, I hope to stand
shoulder-to-shoulder with many of them some day at the barricades. And
then, in the words of the poet J. Bruce Glasier, "We'll turn things upside
down"
Steve Keen:
Well, good luck. I am rather a cynic of the prospects for revolutionary
change, and the possibility of the resultant society bearing any
resemblance to the hopes of those who fought for revolution. This attitude
emanates not just from my reading of Marx, but also my knowledge of complex
dynamics: I can hardly meld a knowledge of 'sensitive dependence in intial
conditions' with a belief that revolutionary change will have the eventual
outcome which revolutionaries desire.
So I doubt the occurrence of outright revolution in western capitalist
nations (though not so third world ones), and I dispute that such change,
if it occurred, would result in the sort of society you desire.
However, of more immediate relevance, I believe that advanced capitalism
(specifically, the economies of the USA, Japan and England) are about to
experience their most severe crisis since the Great Depression. I might be
wrong about this, but if I am correct, it will be an easy matter to show
that there has been *no* analytic discussion on this list of how this
crisis came about. This is because understanding this crisis involves an
appreciation of the role of credit money and debt, and this requires a
non-commodity theory of money which is antithetic to the commodity approach
to money derived from a labour theory of value. So in that sense, following
on from your post which inspired my somewhat flippant comment, forthcoming
events may well leave this list as "kind of Marxist equivalent to Nero's
playing the fiddle while Rome was burning".
Full exchange at:
http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/OPE/archive/0103/0084.html
Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
