[lbo-talk] Keynes on Trotsky

Ted Winslow egwinslow at rogers.com
Mon May 31 10:43:59 PDT 2004


Charles Brown wrote:


> One irrational thing about Keynes is that he almost acts like Marx
> never
> existed. This is particularly irrational in critiquing Trotsky (!) If
> Keynes had
> acknowledged Marx and Engels, he might have found quite a bit on the
> "moral and
> intellectual problems of the transformation of society" and "the plan"
> Trotsky is relying on.

I think this is true in one sense, but not in another.

Keynes was prevented by irrational prejudice from reading Marx with the "good will" he demanded from his own readers. In his discussion of Trotsky's ideas, for instance, he says:

"If we pressed him [about 'what it is all for'], I suppose he would mention Marx. And there we will leave him with an echo of his own words - 'together with theological literature, perhaps the most useless, and in any case the most boring form of verbal creation'." (pp. 66-7)

Had he read Marx with good will, however, I don't think he would have found the basis of the ideas of Trotsky and Lenin.

Keynes's view of what he called "the ideal republic of the imagination" is very close to Marx's and draws on the same sources.

For instance, Keynes, following Aristotle (the originator of the idea of political economy as a "moral science"), distinguishes "poesis" from "praxis." Poesis is activity which is a means to an end; praxis is activity which is an end in itself. Both kinds of activity require for their elaboration as fully rational activities Aristotle's ideas (discussed in book VI of Nicomachean Ethics) of "nous", "techne", "episteme", "phronesis" and "sophia." In Marx's ideal republic of the imagination, poesis is the activity that defines "the realm of necessity" and praxis the activity that defines "the realm of freedom."

Activities as praxis are the activities of appropriating and creating beauty and truth within relations of mutual recognition. This idea of "the realm of freedom" is the same as Keynes's "ideal republic of the imagination."

Interpreted in this way, "praxis" is both an ontological and an epistemological doctrine. As sublated by Marx via Hegel, it becomes the idea of human being as praxis within internal relations, an idea of human being consistent with the existence of a human capacity to know reality as it is in itself and hence avoid the divide between phenomena and noumena implied by the materialist ontology derived from Newton. This idea of "praxis" as both an ontological and an epistemological doctrine is elaborated in the Theses on Feuerbach.

This is also Whitehead's answer to the epistemological doctrines of Hume and Kant. I think there is a possibility that Keynes went some way toward adopting this as his own epistemology (for the same psychopathological reasons that prevented him from reading Marx with "good will," however, he found it difficult to acknowledge Whitehead as a source of insight). One piece of textual evidence supportive of this hypothesis is Keynes's discussion, in his essay on Frank Ramsey, of "human logic" (as opposed to formal logic) as the true idea of rationality. Whitehead's epistemology can be interpreted as "human logic" in this sense. There is reason to believe, therefore, that Keyne's epistemological views are similar in important ways to Marx's.

Are these ideas about "what it is all for" and "praxis" also those of Lenin and Trotsky?

Ted



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