From: Ted Winslow Monetary crankery is an expression of the psychopathology Keynes treats as "the essential characteristic of capitalism" - "the dependence upon an intense appeal to the money-making and money-loving instincts of individuals as the main motive force of the economic machine."
As I've pointed out before, Keynes treats one such monetary crank, Hayek, as an "extraordinary example" of this. Having pointed to Hayek's particular view of how everything can be fixed by fixing money, he invokes a metaphor from Ibsen's The Wild Duck to indicate the psychopathology involved. "it is the attempt to build a bridge [between "the theory of value" and "the theory of money"] on the part of the neo-classical school which has led to the worst muddles of all. For the latter have inferred that there must be two sources of supply to meet the investment demand-schedule; namely, savings proper, which are the savings dealt with by the classical school, plus the sum made available by any increase in the quantity of money (this being balanced by some species of levy on the public, called “forced saving” or the like). This leads on to the idea that there is a 'natural' or 'neutral'[6] or 'equilibrium' rate of interest, namely, that rate of interest which equates investment to classical savings proper without any addition from “forced savings”; and finally to what, assuming they are on the right track at the start, is the most obvious solution of all, namely, that, if the quantity of money could only be kept constant in all circumstances, none of these complications would arise, since the evils supposed to result from the supposed excess of investment over savings proper would cease to be possible. But at this point we are in deep water. 'The wild duck has dived down to the bottom — as deep as she can get — and bitten fast hold of the weed and tangle and all the rubbish that is down there, and it would need an extraordinarily clever dog to dive after and fish her up again.'" <http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/general-theory/ch14.htm > According to Keynes, the psychopathogy at issue is, as I've also many times pointed out, "a deep-seated obsession associating idle balances, not with the action of the banks in fixing the supply of cash or with the attitude of the public towards the comparative attractions of cash and other assets, but with some aspect of current savings." (XIV, p. 214) The psychoanalytic explantion of this "deep-seated obsession" is found in Ferenczi's "The Ontogenesis of Interest in Money", one of the four papers setting out "the Freudian theory of the love of money, and of gold in particular" listed in the bibliographic footnote reference to the theory in the Treatise on Money. “Observation of the behaviour of children and analytic investigation of neurotics ... shews that children originally devote their interest without any inhibition to the process of defaecation, and that it affords them pleasure to hold back their stools. The excrementa thus held back are really the first 'savings' of the growing being, and as such remain in a constant, unconscious inter-relationship with every bodily activity or mental striving that has anything to do with collecting, hoarding, and saving.” (Ferenczi, in Sex in Psycho- Analysis (Contributions to Psycho-Analysis), 1956 Dover paperback reprint edition, pp. 270-1) The "complex" of which Hayek's money crankery is an expression also involves sadism (understood psychoanalytically as unmastered death instinct) itself channelled into "deep-seated obsessions", in particular, into a psychpathalogical mistaken use of axiomatic deductive reasoning, into "extraordinary examples of how starting from a mistake a remorseless logician can end up in Bedlam." This aspect of the "complex" is pointed to in the GT as an important obstacle in the way of transcending "capitalism" defined in the above way. It's an obstacle overlooked by Marx, for whom capitalism is also M-C-M' (interpreted in this way as expressing the capitalist "passions"). Ted ^^^^^^^^^ CB: On these issues, Freud commits vulgar materialist (smile) and individual reductionist error. Money grubbing, greed ,is cultural or socio-historical , not natural. It is not an instinct. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
