tom walker wrote:
If by "greater rationality" you mean, for Marx, "all the powers of science and of nature, as of social combination and of social intercourse," then we're singing out of the same hymn book, namely the Grundrisse's "Fragment on Machines". We've got that greater rationality. But we've also got the persistance of the desire "to use labour time as the measuring rod" and "to maintain the already created value as value." To call the latter "irrational" would be to imply that the greater irrationality grows in proportion to the greater rationality, which I think would be a most pessimistic law of ethnodynamics.
I don't think this is so. On Marx's premises, capitalist social relations both facilitate and ultimately fetter the development of rationality.
The continuing domination of production by M-C-M' is domination by irrational "passions." Science and technology in their present forms also continue to embody a significant degree of irrationality. The social relations within which they've developed are incompatible with the full development of rationality. They would be transformed by the development made possible by the creation of social relations consistent with full development. This is an implication of the identification of "free time" with "the development of human powers as an end in itself." This development then reacts back on "labour" understood as the instrumental activity that defines the "realm of necessity."
"It is self-evident that if time of labour is reduced to a normal length and, furthermore, labour is no longer performed for someone else, but for myself, and, at the same time, the social contradictions between master and men, etc., being abolished, it acquires a quite different, a free character, it becomes real social labour, and finally the basis of disposable time - the time of labour of a man who has also disposable time, must be of a much higher quality than that of the beast of burden." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus- value/ch21.htm>
"The saving of labour time [is] equal to an increase of free time, i.e. time for the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts back upon the productive power of labour as itself the greatest productive power. From the standpoint of the direct production process it can be regarded as the production of fixed capital, this fixed capital being man himself. It goes without saying, by the way, that direct labour time itself cannot remain in the abstract antithesis to free time in which it appears from the perspective of bourgeois economy. Labour cannot become play, as Fourier would like, [5] although it remains his great contribution to have expressed the suspension not of distribution, but of the mode of production itself, in a higher form, as the ultimate object. Free time - which is both idle time and time for higher activity - has naturally transformed its possessor into a different subject, and he then enters into the direct production process as this different subject. This process is then both discipline, as regards the human being in the process of becoming; and, at the same time, practice [Ausübung], experimental science, materially creative and objectifying science, as regards the human being who has become, in whose head exists the accumulated knowledge of society."
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch14.htm>
You said earlier that Keynes, like Marx was "overly optimistic." But I'm not sure if I could agree either that it was optimism or that it was excessive. It was, if you'll pardon the segue (and the recapitulation), poetry. What do I mean by "poetry"? I mean something close to the circle of narrated time and lived time by means of which we give cognitive coherence to our lives that Ricoeur discussed in the part 1, vol. 1 of Time and Narrative.
Keynes himself calls it "the optimistic hypothesis" and gives the following rationalization for it.
"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. And it happens that there is a subtle reason drawn from economic analysis why, in this case, faith may work. For if we consistently act on the optimistic hypothesis, this hypothesis will tend to be realised; whilst by acting on the pessimistic hypothesis we can keep ourselves for ever in the pit of want."
"No one can be certain of anything in this age of flux and change. Decaying standards of life at a time when our command over the production of material satisfactions is the greatest ever, and a diminishing scope for individual decision and choice at a time when more than before we should be able to afford these satisfactions, are sufficient to indicate an underlying contradiction in every department of our economy. No plans will work for certain in such an epoch. But if they palpably fail, then, of course, we and everyone else will try something different. "Meanwhile for us the best policy is to act on the optimistic hypothesis until it has been proved wrong. We shall do well not to fear the future too much. Preserving all due caution in our own activities, the job for us is to get through the next five years in conditions which are favourable and not unfavourable to the restoration of our full productive efficiency and strength of purpose, of our prestige with others and of our confidence in ourselves. We shall run more risk of jeopardising the future if we are influenced by indefinite fears based on trying to look ahead further than any one can." (vol. XXVII, pp. 445-6)
Ted
