[lbo-talk] Keynes: Marx and the Koran

[Shane Mage]

Yoshie wrote:
>
>  > Marx and Schumpeter were talking about technological progress in the
>>  *means of production* under capitalism with its *concomitant*
>>  destruction of "capital values."  The economic analysis of neither is
>>  in the least concerned with their own subjective views of the
>>  worthiness of particular consumption goods offered on the market.  To
>>  condemn capitalism because of the alleged "spuriousness" of those
>>  use-values is to wallow in what both Marx and Schumpeter would
>>  unhesitatingly call philistine sentimentality.
>
>What's wrong with judging the capitalist mode of production by
>standards, whether they are moral or political, religious or
>aesthetic, that are other than the standard of liberalism: "Freedom,
>Equality, Property, and Bentham"?

What is "wrong" (anti-historical-materialist) is to judge an entire 
epoch of human history, the capitalist mode of production, by 
subjective rather
than historical standards--and historical standards are objective, imposed
by history itself.  The capitalist mode of production is judged, can be judged,
is being judged, will be judged, only by its own inner standards. The
judgment, as foreseen by Marx, is that a mode of production whose inner
essence is the unlimited development of humanity's productive forces 
was doomed by its specific inner contradictions to become a "barrier" 
to the
development of those productive forces so severe that its tendencies to
self-preservation would become--have indeed become-threatening to
the survival of civilization, perhaps of human life itself.

Shane Mage

"Die Weltgeschict ist das Weltgericht" (Hegel)