[lbo-talk] pain & development

[Ted Winslow]

Grant Lee wrote:

> This is an old chestnut; those antagonistic to (orthodox/classical)
> historical materialist theories of history posit a _superficial_  
> resemblance
> to  "messianic-apocalyptic visions" and "sadomonetarism". This kind of  
> slur
> does not, however, disprove historical materialist theories of history.

It wasn't meant to disprove it.  That requires a different kind of  
analysis, the kind that provides the rest of the basis for Keynes’s  
quip.

The problem is that any attempt – such as Marx’s attempt to deduce  
immiserization from long run changes in the organic composition of  
capital and the rate of profit  – to deduce long run consequences from  
fixed axioms ignores the feature of reality that makes Marx’s  
materialism “historical,” namely that reality is a system of “internal  
relations.”  This is the idea that the essences of things are the  
outcome of their relations and so change with changes in their  
relations.

This limits the applicability of deductive reasoning, the limits  
becoming greater the less stable the relevant relations and the farther  
into the future the consequences to be deduced.  This is because  
changed relations may invalidate the axioms. As I’ve previously pointed  
out (http://squawk.ca/lbo-talk/0111/0208.html), Whitehead explains why  
this is so for deductive reasoning in general and for any form of  
deductive reasoning that makes use of the logical concept of the  
“variable” (e.g. algebra) in particular.

Marx’s argument ignores this implication.  For instance, it makes  
assumptions about the nature of technical change in the long run,  
something which can’t be known and which there is no reason to believe  
must be of the kind the argument requires.  Nor is it evident why, even  
if the organic composition were to rise and the rate of profit fall,  
this would lead to immiserization. This depends on, among other things,  
what happens to the identities of capitalists and workers (certain  
features of these identities must remain unchanged for them to continue  
to be capitalists and workers, but this leaves lots of room for  
variation in their identities, variation having significant  
implications for the functioning of capitalism).

Marx himself claims, for example, that the subjectivity – the identity  
– of the capitalist changes through time.  The capitalist  
characteristic of early capitalism is dominated by more irrational  
feelings about money and money-making than the capitalist  
characteristic of mature capitalism.  Psychollogically, he is primarily  
a “hoarder,” “ a martyr to exchange-value, a holy ascetic seated at the  
top of a metal column”  
(http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/ 
ch02_3.htm#hoard).  He’s also much more overtly sadistic.  One  
expression of this early capitalist psychology is a focus on making  
money through commerce and usury rather than through control of an  
industrial labour process.  In contrast, the capitalist of mature  
capitalism focuses on industrial production and is less given  
psychologically to hoarding and asceticism (see, e.g., Capital, vol. I  
[Penguin ed.], pp.738-46  
(<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch24.htm#S3>).

The assumption that relations are internal is also an essential feature  
of Keynes’s economics.   He claims, for instance, that, as capitalism  
matures, the psychology of both capitalist and worker will change in a  
way that will, as in Marx, increase capitalist consumption out of  
profits but will also increase wages (this is the basis of his claim in  
his last published article that the US balance of payments would not  
continue in surplus because the US, for these psychological reasons,  
was in the process of “becoming a high-living, high-cost country” (this  
repeats an argument made in The Economic Consequences of the Peace  
about capitalism in general).  Mistakenly basing himself on, among  
other things, his own falling rate of profit argument, he also claimed  
that a falling rate of profit would improve income distritution in  
capitalism by making necessary the “euthanasia of the rentier” (General  
Theory, pp. 374-7).

The conclusion that capitalism will be transformed into a better system  
by absolute immiserization also requires that such immiserization be  
not merely consistent with but productive of a subject able to do this.  
  Socialism requires a particular kind of subject – a very highly  
developed one - both for its creation and for its continuing existence.  
  The idea that such a subject could develop in conditions of absolute  
immiserization is prima facie absurd (certainly it contradicts what is  
claimed about the requirements for positive development in Klein's  
version of psychoanalysis).

Keynes also associated mistaken reliance on formal logic with  
psychopathology.  Such mistaken reliance is the problem with Ricardo’s  
approach to economics and constitutes the “Ricardian vice” (a criticism  
of Ricardo also made, as Keynes points out, by Marshall on the ground  
that it ignores the fact of internal relations).  One sign of this  
psychopathology is immunity to reductio ad absurdum arguments.  As I’ve  
also pointed out before (http://squawk.ca/lbo-talk/0107/0488.html and  
http://squawk.ca/lbo-talk/0207/0711.html), Keynes used arguments of  
Hayek to illustrate this.

Hayek argued that the suffering associated with the Great Depression  
would be much more than fully offset by future benefits because it was  
a necessary concomitant of correcting the investment errors generated  
by the preceding boom, errors caused by inflationary increases in the  
money supply (both these ideas ignore internal relations – long run  
predictions based on the quantity theory of money were, in fact, the  
original object of Keynes’s quip.)  Keynes claims of this argument that  
it is "an extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a  
remorseless logician can end up in Bedlam."

Psychologically consistent with all this, Austrian economics defines  
human being in terms of Keynes’s idea of capitalist “purposiveness”  
(http://squawk.ca/lbo-talk/0103/0226.html).

All these features - messianic-apocalyptic thinking, the embracing of  
suffering, the mistaken identification of reason with formal logic, the  
belief in magical mathematical formulas relating money to the  
achievement of some ultimate good, capitalist “purposiveness” – are  
claimed in Kleinian psychoanalysis to be aspects of the same  
psychopathological complex, a complex issuing from a particular set of  
social relations (Klein’s theory derives subjectivity from “object  
relations”).  These psychological claims are, therefore, claims  
grounded in an approach consistent with “historical materialism”  
understood as an ontology of internal relations.

Ted