Julio Huato wrote:
> Is it really hard to see that the idea that workers are driven by
> "monetized avarice" is a tiny bit problematic? I have no problem
> characterizing a Madoff as driven by "monetized avarice," but wage
> workers forced to sell their labor power to the capitalists?
>
> Read Harrod or Skidelsky on how contemptuously J.M. Keynes viewed the
> struggles of actually-existing workers, for example those Russians in
> November 1917. Keynes had strong opinions about all that. In 1925,
> Keynes published a Short View of Russia. (He married a Russian
> ballerina from Diaghilev's company. Although, I believe she left
> Russia before the revolution, many of the Diaghilev dancers came from
> families that felt compelled to leave Russia after the revolution.)
>
> His views on Marx's Capital are easy to fetch with Google. Marxism,
> as I understand it, doesn't romanticize workers, their struggles, or
> their organizations. If the situation or behavior of workers under
> existing conditions were ideal, then why the need for them to rebel?
> But Marxism does view workers, collectively, potentially at least, as
> the preeminent liberating social force under capitalism. IMO, that is
> more valid now than ever. But that's another conversation....
In Keynes's economics, it's primarily the "capitalist classes" whose motives are dominated by "the money-making and money-loving instincts" (which are "instincts" in a sense derived from the fact that, on Keynes's psychoanalytic understanding of them, they are transformations of the ultimate "instincts" as conceived by Freud - Eros and the death instinct).
"The immense accumulations of fixed capital which, to the great benefit of mankind, were built up during the half century before the war, could never have come about in a society where wealth was divided equitably. The railways of the world, which that age built as a monument to posterity, were, not less than the pyramids of Egypt, the work of labour which was not free to consume in immediate enjoyment the full equivalent of its efforts. Thus this remarkable system depended for its growth on a double bluff or deception. On the one hand the labouring classes accepted from ignorance or powerlessness, or were compelled, persuaded, or cajoled by custom, convention, authority, and the well-established order of society into accepting, a situation in which they could call their own very little of the cake that they and nature and the capitalists were co-operating to produce. And on the other hand the capitalist classes were allowed to call the best part of the cake theirs and were theoretically free to consume it, on the tacit underlying condition that they consumed very little of it in practice. The duty of 'saving' became nine-tenths of virtue and the growth of the cake the object of true religion. There grew round the non-consumption of the cake all those instincts of puritanism which in other ages has withdrawn itself from the world and has neglected the arts of production as well as those of enjoyment. And so the cake increased; but to what end was not clearly contemplated. Individuals would be exhorted not so much to abstain as to defer, and to cultivate the pleasures of security and anticipation. Saving was for old age or for your children; but this was only in theory -- the virtue of the cake was that it was never to be consumed, neither by you nor by your children after you." <http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/keynes/peace.htm
>
So motivated, the capitalist classes were, as in Marx's treatment of the same motives as "passions" in Hegel's sense, acting as "the unconscious tool of history". (Notice at the end of this passage another allusion to the Freudian idea of the "money-loving and money- making instincts" as, in part, deriving from the "repression", the "forgetting", of the sexual instinct, the instinctive basis of "the fertility of the species".)
"In writing thus I do not necessarily disparage the practices of that generation. In the unconscious recesses of its being society knew what it was about. The cake was really very small in proportion to the appetites of consumption, and no one, if it were shared all round, would be much the better off by the cutting of it. Society was working not for the small pleasures of today but for the future security and improvement of the race -- in fact for 'progress'. If only the cake were not cut but was allowed to grow in the geometrical proportion predicted by Malthus of population, but not less true of compound interest, perhaps a day might come when there would at last be enough to go round, and when posterity could enter into the enjoyment of our labours. In that day overwork, overcrowding, and underfeeding would come to an end, and men, secure of the comforts and necessities of the body, could proceed to the nobler exercises of their faculties. One geometrical ratio might cancel another, and the nineteenth century was able to forget the fertility of the species in a contemplation of the dizzy virtues of compound interest." <http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/keynes/peace.htm
>
A Short View of Russia is more nuanced than the characterization above suggests.
In addition to features that express Keynes's own remaining psychopathology - features such as his contempt for "the boorish proletariat" and his dismissal of it as possessing any potential to develop what Marx called "free individuality", his anti-Semitism, his contemptuous dismissal of Marx (expressing his psychologically based blindness to the fact that Marx's foundational ontological, anthropological and psychological assumptions were very like his own) - it recognizes in "Leninism" a
"factor ... which may ..., in a changed form and a new setting, contribute something to the new religion of the future, if there be any true religion [meaning by ‘religion’ in this context that ‘sublimation of materialistic egotism ... in which the ego ... is merged in the pursuit of an ideal life for the whole community of men’]. _Leninism is absolutely, defiantly non-supernatural, and its emotional and ethical essence centres about the individual's and the community's attitude towards the love of money._
"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. I do not merely mean that it sets up a new ideal. I mean that it tries to construct a framework of society in which pecuniary motives as influencing action shall have a changed relative importance, in which social approbations shall be differently distributed, and where behaviour, which previously was normal and respectable, ceases to be either the one or the other." (Collected Writings, vol. IX, pp. 259-60)
Earlier in the essay, he quotes Trotsky as having
"looked forward to 'a society which will have thrown off the pinching and stultifying worry about one's daily bread ... in which the liberated egotism of man - a mighty force! - will be directed wholly towards the understanding, the transformation, and the betterment of the Universe'. Trotsky himself does not confuse the means [the 'Socialist Revolution'] with the end:
'The Revolution itself is not yet the Kingdom of Freedom. On the contrary, it is developing the features of "necessity" to the greatest degree ... Revolutionary literature cannot but be imbued with a spirit of social hatred, which is a creative historic factor in the epoch of proletarian dictatorship. But under Socialism solidarity will be the basis of society. Literature and Art will be tuned to a different key. All the emotions which we revolutionaries, at the present time, feel apprehensive of naming - so much have they been worn thin by hypocrites and vulgarians - such as disinterested friendship, love for one's neighbour, sympathy, will be the mighty ringing chords of Socialist poetry.'" (vol. IX, p. 255)
Keynes is also very critical of aspects of post-1917 Russia.
The Russian "revolution" did not create, and could not have created, a "socialist" society in Marx's sense. It was not the outcome of a "revolutionary praxis" initiated and carried out by individuals with the required developed degree of "free individuality", and it did not create a society from which all barriers to full human development had been removed. Marx's 1881 surmises about the consistency of conditions in the Russian peasant commune with those required to develop the required degree of "free individuality" were mistaken.
Ted