On Jul 19, 2011, at 10:57 AM, raghu wrote: > Anyway this just raises the larger question which I have never really > understood: what was the reason for Keynes' animosity to Marx?
Class. Some choice quotes from Keynes on the topic: "How can I accept a doctrine 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." "I do not mean that Russian Communism alters, or even seeks to alter, human nature, that it makes Jews less avaricious or Russians less extravagant than they were before." "the class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie" "[Marx wanted to] organize the myriad Lilliputians and arm them with poisoned arrows.... [Communism] enormously overestimates the significance of the economic problem. If you leave that to me, I will look after it." > And conversely what is the reason for current-day Marxists' animosity to > Keynes? Hostility to the idea that government policy can fix capitalism's problems without a revolution. Strong emphasis on finance, which many Marxists view as secondary or epiphenominal. Also the emphasis on psychology, which is deemed suspiciously subjective and "unscientific." Me, I think there's a lot to be learned from JMK. Doug _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
