[lbo-talk] Keynes, Marx Koran

Rakesh Bhandari bhandari at berkeley.edu
Wed Sep 19 10:04:10 PDT 2007


Well if Bush indicates how educated the bourgeoisie are, then Keynes would have found himself in the Grand Hotel Abyss.

But turgid? Understanding the nature of the contradiction between commodities and money and its consequences--the possibility of crisis even in the circuit C-M-C. Then distinguishing that circuit from M-C-M'. In his Treatise on Money Keynes is self consciously indebted to Marx's circuit analysis as Masoto Aoki has shown. Just dishonest controversializing on the part of Keynes

There are contradictions everywhere in Marx-- in the relative decline of variable capital and the rise in the rate of surplus value, in the demands on the industrial workforce to be both rigid and mobile, between use value and value requirements even in simple reproduction, in the requirements of social production (law of value) and private appropriation (redistribution of value via profit seeking), in the need for endogeneous credit money and the functions of money as a store and measure of value (though I think much more needs to be said here), in the compulsion to advance the productive forces and to preserve the value of the extant capital. And Marx wanted to explain why contradictions were dis-simulated through the wage form and the forms of revenue (see chapter on the trinity formula)

Turgid? Ricardo's whole theory of value is in the first chapter of Principles. Marx's is developed with surprising discoveries over three volumes so that market phenomena are not forced to comply without mediation to abstract theories.

There is just no similar depth of thinking in Keynes or Schumpeter. Schumpeter's dynamics result from the deux ex machina of supernormal personalities with access to credit, not immanent contradictions. Schumpeter goes so far as to say that there would be no profit in simple reproduction until it is disrupted externally by the super normal entrepreneur. His theory of profit is laughably ideological.

On Keynes' social Darwinism, see John Toye, Keynes on Population. OUP, 2000: 104-107 on Keynes's disparaging comments about the Indian famine codes in terms of their excessive zeal for saving native lives.

I wish Blackburn had re-read George Catephores' brilliant essay on Schumpeter in the New Left Review around 1994. I also posted a review of Swedberg's biography around that time.

Rakesh



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list