----- Original Message ----- From: "Ted Winslow" <egwinslow at rogers.com>
One key thing they have in common is that both treat the psychology of the capitalist as a form of self-estrangement, the essential feature of which is an irrational love of money and money-making so that M-C-M' also represents the irrational subjectivity of capitalism. Marx understands this in terms of Hegel's idea of the "passions"; Keynes most likely understands it in terms of the psychoanalytic theory of greed as an expression of psychopathology.
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Just *who* gets to define what self-estrangement means in the sociological sense of the term you seem to be using? What is the non-estrangement baseline that determines that the love of money is irrational?
I thought capitalism was a process without a subject; how can a non-subject/agent be irrational? Who gets to decide?
A lot of the sections of C v. I you refer to below look like representative agent models which lots of left economists, sociologists etc. are leery of when used by people like Robert Lucas etc. Why should KM get a free pass?
If capitalism is an economic-ecological determinism, an ontological necessity and opposition to it is a necessity then contradictions are necessary too, no? For if capitalism were necessarily consistent then why would opposition to it be considered rational if rationality is monoontological?
If the former is a necessity -in terms of being a *mechanism*- but the latter isn't, then.........?
If the latter is, but the former isn't, what is the necessary baseline from which we decide capitalism is a form of individual and collective self-estrangement? If the baseline itself is contingent then what is the meaning of the term self-estrangement?
Or is *mechanism* and similar terms in KM's discourse metaphorical.........?
Ian