> Money-loving is not an instinct. It is learned. There was no money
> when human instincts developed. Money originates about 5 or 6,000
> years ago in Mesopotamia.
>
> This is important because, if money-loving were an instinct, it would
> be almost impossible to end capitalism without mass genetic
> engineering.
As the rest of what I quoted suggests, by pointing to " the dependence upon an intense appeal to the money-making and money-loving instincts of individuals as the main motive force of the economic machine" Keynes meant to indicate their status as transformations of the ultimate human "instincts" which he, following Freud, took to be the sexual and death "instincts".
^^^^^ CB: Pace Freud, I'd think there's a self-preservation instinct before a death instinct. Sexual instinct is not the individual , self-preservation instinct.
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That this is the meaning explains both his claim that "opportunities for money-making and private wealth" canalise "dangerous human procliviites" and his more general claim that the more direct expression of these ultimate instincts in uncontrolled population growth and war are the main obstacles they put in the way of solving "the economic problem".
^^^^^^^ CB: Gotta disagree with Freud. War is not instinctive. It's learned, cultural. It directly contradicts the instinct of self-preservation. Durkheim is better on this than Freud.
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As in Marx, human development is ultimately a development of what Keynes called "the universal element in the soul of man". This development substitutes rational self-determination of feeling, thinking, willing and acting for instinctive determination. So the positing of human "instincts" does not by itself imply that "it would be almost impossible to end capitalism without mass genetic engineering".
^^^^^ CB: If money-loving were a genetically based instinct, it would be.
In general, I don't agree with Freud's paradigm here. I don't think Marx pre-adopted a Freudian anthropology either.
^^^^
In Marx, this treatment of development appropriates the treatment of the development of "enlightenment" - of what Hegel calls "educated men" and Marx calls "universally developed individuals" - in the Kant/ Hegel philosophies of history.
"Freedom as the ideal of that which is original and natural, does not exist as original and natural. Rather must it be first sought out and won; and that by an incalculable medial discipline of the intellectual and moral powers. The state of Nature is, therefore, predominantly that of injustice and violence, of untamed natural impulses, of inhuman deeds and feelings. Limitation is certainty produced by Society and the State, but it is a limitation of the mere brute emotions and rude instincts; as also, in a more advanced stage of culture, of the premeditated self-will of caprice and passion. This kind of constraint is part of the instrumentality by which only, the consciousness of Freedom and the desire for its attainment, in its true – that is Rational and Ideal form – can be obtained. To the Ideal of Freedom, Law and Morality are indispensably requisite: and they are in and for themselves, universal existences, objects and aims; which are discovered only by the activity of thought, separating itself from the merely sensuous, and developing itself, in opposition thereto; and which must on the other hand, be introduced into and incorporated with the originally sensuous will, and that contrarily to its natural inclination." <http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/history4.htm>
^^^^^^^ CB: See Marx's critique of Hegel's concept of the State. He doesn't agree that it is 'the reality of the ethical idea', 'the image and reality of reason', as Hegel maintains.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/index.htm
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As I recently pointed out, this idea of development is appropriated in Engels's explanation in Anti-Duhring of the progressiveness of ancient slavery, i.e.
"As men originally made their exit from the animal world—in the narrower sense of the term—so they made their entry into history: still half animal, brutal, still helpless in face of the forces of nature, still ignorant of their own strength; and consequently as poor as the animals and hardly more productive than they.” http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch16.htm
"The spontaneously evolved division of labour within the family cultivating the soil made possible, at a certain level of well-being, the incorporation of one or more strangers as additional labour forces. This was especially the case in countries where the old common ownership of the land had already disintegrated or at least the former joint cultivation had given place to the separate cultivation of parcels of land by the respective families. Production had developed so far that the labour-power of a man could now produce more than was necessary for its mere maintenance; the means of maintaining additional labour forces existed; likewise the means of employing them; labour-power acquired a value. But the community itself and the association to which it belonged yielded no available, superfluous labour forces. On the other hand, such forces were provided by war, and war was as old as the simultaneous existence alongside each other of several groups of communities. Up to that time one had not known what to do with prisoners of war, and had therefore simply killed them; at an even earlier period, eaten them. But at the stage of "economic situation" which had now been attained, the prisoners acquired value; one therefore let them live and made use of their labour. ... the introduction of slavery under the conditions prevailing at that time was a great step forward. For it is a fact that man sprang from the beasts, and had consequently to use barbaric and almost bestial means to extricate himself from barbarism. Where the ancient communities have continued to exist, they have for thousands of years formed the basis of the cruellest form of state, Oriental despotism, from India to Russia. It was only where these communities dissolved that the peoples made progress of themselves, and their next economic advance consisted in the increase and development of production by means of slave labour. It is clear that so long as human labour was still so little productive that it provided but a small surplus over and above the necessary means of subsistence, any increase of the productive forces, extension of trade, development of the state and of law, or foundation of art and science, was possible only by means of a greater division of labour. And the necessary basis for this was the great division of labour between the masses discharging simple manual labour and the few privileged persons directing labour, conducting trade and public affairs, and, at a later stage, occupying themselves with art and science. The simplest and most natural form of this division of labour was in fact slavery. In the historical conditions of the ancient world, and particularly of Greece, the advance to a society based on class antagonisms could be accomplished only in the form of slavery. This was an advance even for the slaves; the prisoners of war, from whom the mass of the slaves was recruited, now at least saved their lives, instead of being killed as they had been before, or even roasted, as at a still earlier period." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch16.htm
^^^^^^^ CB: Yes, the primitive societies _may_ be crueler _ when they have a state_, but before they had a state , no. I don't know that they were crueler than some capitalist state have been. And , of course, Engels is on board , in _The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State_ for in communism, dumping the state on to the trash heap of history or in the museums of antiquities.
"The state, then, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it, that had no idea of the state and state power. At a certain stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up with the split of society into classes, the state became a necessity owing to this split. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes not only will have ceased to be a necessity, but will become a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as they arose at an earlier stage. Along with them the state will inevitably fall. Society, which will reorganize production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into a museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe."
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What Keynes regarded as innate and only eradicable through "eugenics" was not the "instincts" themselves, but the weakness of "the universal element in the soul of man".
^^^^^ CB; Ok. You might want to elaborate a materialist notion of the "soul of man".
^^^^^
Marx, in contrast, claimed that this "weakness" was pretty much entirely the product of social relations and could be removed by means of changes in such relations.
^^^^^ CB: Ok. So, Marx differs from Keynes on this point. Marx seems to have the better idea here.
^^^
He claimed capitalist relations worked to increase the strength of this element in wage-labourers sufficiently to enable them to will to undertake the revolutionary "praxis" which would then further "educate" them to the degree necessary to enable them to "appropriate" the development of mind objectified in developed capitalist forces of production and use the latter to create the penultimate social form from which all barriers to the full development of "the universal element in the soul of man" had been eliminated. This is an application of Hegel's "higher dialectic of the conception".
That capitalist social relations work to "educate" wage-labourers in this sense is a "rose" in the "cross" of the capitalist "present" in Hegel's sense that "to recognise reason as the rose in the cross of the present, and to find delight in it, is a rational insight". http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pr/preface.htm
Ted
^^^^^^^^ CB: That's a nice image. Hadn't heard that before. And seems a good idea. Sort of like Marx and Engels' "rational kernel". I appreciate this a succinct statement of an idea you have espoused in many posts to the lists.