tom walker wrote:
Keynes said in the long-term we're all dead. Well, I say in the short-term we're all slaves to circumstance. Our task, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, is nothing less than to make the continuum of history explode so that the chains of "long-term" and "short-term" lose their power: a tiger's leap into the open air of history.
Keynes's point was that it usually isn't possible to justify short term pain on the ground that it will be overwhelmed by long run gains. This is because, so he claimed, no rational grounds are usually available for belief in the long run gains. Moreover, given that the destruction of existing arrangements can liberate irrational emotions that will now find their outlet in much worse forms of "cruelty, the reckless pursuit of personal power and authority, and other forms of self-aggrandisement" (witness WW I, the rise of fascism and Nazism, and WW II) the short term pain issuing from the destruction of existing arrangements is likely to prove much greater than those enthusiastic for "a tiger's leap into the open air of history" expect.
Though opposed on these grounds to apocalyptic messianic visions of the process that would actualize the "ideal social republic," his idea of this republic is very close to Marx's. Thus he claims that the "central thesis throughout" his discussion, in Essays in Persuasion, of long run future possibilities, of "economic possibilities for our grandchildren," is:
"the profound conviction that the economic problem, as one may call it for short, the problem of want and poverty and the economic struggle between classes and nations, is nothing but a frightful muddle, a transitory and an unnecessary muddle. For the western world already has the resources and the technique, if we could create the organisation to use them, capable of reducing the economic problem, which now absorbs our moral and material energies, to a position of secondary importance. "Thus the author of these essays, for all his croakings, still hopes and believes that the day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and that the arena of the heart and head will be occupied, or reoccupied, by our real problems - the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behaviour and religion." (Collected Writings, vol. IX p. xviii)
Here he was, like Marx, overly optimistic. Ted
