> Except Keynes was a total snob and racist. Need I quote the classics?
>
> Marx wanted to “organize the myriad Lilliputians and arm them with
> poisoned arrows.”
>
> "We were not aware that civilisation was a thin and precarious crust
> erected by the personality and will of a very few, and only
> maintained by rules and conventions skilfully put across and
> guilefully preserved."
>
> "How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish,
> exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and the
> intelligentsia who, with whatever faults, are the quality in life and
> surely carry the seeds of all human advancement?"
>
> "I do not mean that Russian Communism alters, or even seeks to alter,
> human nature, that it makes Jews less avaricious or Russians less
> extravagant than they were before."
>
> "[T]he class war will find me on the side of the educated
> bourgeoisie."
This is true.
Marx, as I've also pointed out, makes the "self-estrangement" of the "proletariat" positively developmental of the capabilities required to imagine, create and live in the "ideal commonwealth."
My point was that his conception of this ideal - of "the true realm of freedom" - and of the developed capabilities required to imagine, create and live in it is very like Keynes's.
Keynes was radically wrong about potential of "the bourgeois and the intelligentsia" - witness the fate of his own ideas with those to whom they were explicitly addressed - the economists, and the popularity among other parts of the "intelligentsia" of the idea that it's pointless to read texts since reading necessarily "constructs" them in a way that makes it impossible to figure out what they mean.
Was Marx right about the "proletariat"?
Ted