From: Ralph Johansen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sweezy: ....I think that Marxists have a certain defensiveness about Keynes: we mustn't take seriously a bourgeois thinker because it may infect us and maybe we'll turn out to be revisionists without wanting to be, you know. I don't think that's such a danger as long as you internalize the basic structure of Marxism, which is, of course, embodied in and summed up in the value theory and the accumulation theory, surplus-value theory, all of that. That's absolutely crucial. And most of the valuable Keynesian insights can be added to that, at least in my view. There is no need to lose these basic insights which are based on a very intimate knowledge of the real business world--which of course, Marx also had in his day. But which Marxists taking their stuff out of Capital, can't have in our day. This whole business of finance which I was talking about last night. The present financial explosion which is unprecedented can't be handled in terms of the hints in Volume III about finance. ^^^^ Ralph, One caveat that always comes to my mind on fictitious capital is that at one level, we need Marxist politicaleconomists who keep up with the cutting edge developments in bourgeois business theory and economics which now have to track super-duper monopoly finance capital pyrotechnics, bubbles, hedge funds, Keynesiansisms etc. On the other hand, Marxist economists have a responsibility to somehow always relate these observations about objective quantitities and subjective bourgeois qualities to overthrowing capitalism. We agree that capitalism won't just automatically collapse and turn into socialism by the objective motion and crisis of these complicated financial transactions ( it won't have the big one on its own). So, what role does the latest knowledge of the behavior of the world financial system play in bringing about its end ? If the working masses are still the most likely candidate to overthrow capitalism, how does knowledge of the financial behemoth get related and transmitted to them in a way that makes them want to and makes them more capable of overthrowing the system ? I always wonder if Marx left us only Vol. 1 completed on purpose. His reason might be that Marxism is _not_ mainly, or the main task of Marxist political economy is not in Vol. II and III but in Vol. I because, Vol. I relates the economy more directly to the activity of the overwhelming majority of the population as wage-laborers. In other words, what do Keynesians have to say to the workers directly ? Keynes himself is always sneering at them. OK but is there something in Keynesian or superduper finance analysis that is of value to the working class masses' _activity_ in overthrowing capitalism ? In a certain sense, the working class can just take it as a bottomline given that _some_ finance capitalists, the victors in the struggles among them, will emerge as the controllers of the predominant and majority amounts of money in current relative terms - billions 80 years ago, trillions today - and they will start doing their thing to cause their riches to "self-expand" again. The reason they have to keep expanding is that power of money is in part derived from what proportion of the total amount of money in the world a given high financier has. So, "self-expansion" has another sense ,in that "money begets money", and _only_ lots of money can beget money. It's sort of "monopoly money", gameboard money. Are the particulars of its generation really that important to revolutionary struggle ? It doesn't matter whether Tweedle Dees or Tweedle Dums win among the financiers. Somebodies will emerge as the Tophat Dogs. Do "we" really have to understand it to the extent that, like a Keynes or a Soros, we can actually make billions of dollars ? I guess it wouldn't hurt if we wanted to finance the Party like Engels :>) So, in a way, the working masses have to be introduced somehow into high finance theory, Keynesian or Sorosian, not so much as the "source of all value" (since the working masses aren't the source of much of the effective money today). The working class ( or somebody :>) ) has to be related to finance capital as the agents of its abolition, its gravediggers. This is the creative and destructive innovation needed from Marxist financial analysts. What Marx did for ( to ?) the industrial capitalists, Marxists of today must do for/to the finance capitalists. A problem with Keynes is that he did not follow in the tradition of capitalist political economists like Engels, or not fully. Keynes seems highly alienated from the British working people. Maybe that's why he didn't much connect his insights to actions by British workers and masses to disassemble the new features of capitalism he understood so well. Financiers will not be the agents of the abolition of the finance capitalism ( Keynes' pipe dreams to the contrary notwithstanding) That is the same thing as saying finance capital will not self-destruct. Kautsky was wrong. Don't wait around waiting for Wall Street to give _itself_ the Big One, no matter how big the Bubble. It is the search for revolutionary agency that makes pure finance capital ( study of only the activities of financiers) a minor _though not absent_ , chapter of Marxist political economy. Whaddaya think ? Charles
