I have to support again my comrade Lou in his continuing agitation against the merger of Marxism and Keynesianism. The latter makes no claim for abolishing the capitalist system. Therefore all of its reform proposals are ultimately aimed at preserving the capitalist system by partially and temporarily ameliorating SOME
of its horrors. But reforms that are not part of a revolutionary program are the cruelest , cleverest deceptions of the working class.
We see that the New Deal/Great Society have had the ultimate historical effect of quieting the U.S. working class from anger that may have become a revolution. Now that a new generation of the working class has lost the memory of the lessons of the Depression and lost its militancy, the bourgeois are burning up the New Deal reforms as fast as they can. The U.S. working class, robbed of its class memory, especially by the political annihilation of its communists, is being beat up like a blind , addle pated giant. Keynesianism in practice has amounted to a very big trick on the masses.
We can all see and criticise right wing economic policies. But those policies are only possible now because New Deal liberalism has lulled the working class to sleep, allowing the right wing to survive and now rise again. The bourgeois ruling style has always been inherently a good cop/bad cop finesse.
Marxism fights for reforms in a revolutionary manner. Merging it with Keynesianism obliterates the "in a revolutionary manner." That is, Keynesianism smothers the fundamental Marxist idea that the reforms will ultimately and regularly fail and that lesson must be emphasized as a reason that more drastic and fundamental changes must be tried. Keynesianism proceeds as if its superbrilliant, complex reforms are the best and only possible improvements of capitalism. So, in a most important sense Marxism and Keynesianism are irreconcilably antagonistic.
Revolution demands a leap, a sharp break with the old. There is no evolving out of capitalism. That's dialectics and recent economic history is confirming the philosophical principle.
Charles Brown
Detroit
Workers of the West, it's our turn.
_______
>>> Louis Proyect writes
Once again Chris Burford, while invoking Marxism, proposes Keynsian solutions. The "progressive" solution is not to increase the purchasing power of the masses, but to expropriate the capitalist class. Chris Buford thinks that "generous unemployment benefits" are some kind of answer. Speaking for myself, I received the most generous unemployment benefits that any wage worker could receive after I lost a consulting position with Kidder-Peabody, a gang of thieves on Wall Street. I had to borrow $5000 from my retirement funds to pay my rent. No, the answer is to lay off the ruling class, not plead for higher unemployment benefits for the people who create the wealth of society.
Marxists are for the abolition of wage slavery. Chris Burford is some kind of Fabian Socialist, who I wish would stop invoking the good name of Karl Marx. Once again, I must remind folks of what Marx called for:
>>At the same time, and quite apart from the general servitude involved in
the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves
the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget
that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those
effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing
its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady.
They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable
guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing
encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand
that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system
simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms
necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the
conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!" they ought
to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the
wages system!"<<
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)