> She also had a barbed comment on JMK himself, the exact wording of
> which I wish I could remember. But it went something like: Keynes
> wanted to increase investment. Pity he said so little about
> investment in what.
On what social productive forces would ultimately be for in an "ideal social republic," Keynes was much closer to Marx than Joan Robinson. In that republic, a republic on "the far left of celestial space," he claimed we would finally be free
“to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue - that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable to taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin." (vol. IX, pp. 330-1) <http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/368keynesgrandchildren.html>
In the meantime, while waiting for capitalism to solve "the economic problem" by, as in Marx, working to create the social productive forces actualization of this ideal commonwealth would require, public investment was to be based on values more rational than the money motives.
"Where we are using up resources, do not let us submit to the vile doctrine of the nineteenth century that every enterprise must justify itself in pounds, shillings and pence of cash income, with no other denominator of values but this. I should like to see the war memorials of this tragic struggle take the shape of an enrichment of the civic life of every great centre of population. Why should we not set aside, let us say, £50 millions a year for the next twenty years to add in every substantial city of the realm the dignity of an ancient university or a European capital to our local schools and their surroundings, to our local government and its offices, and above all perhaps, to provide a local centre of refreshment and entertainment with an ample theatre, a concert hall, a dance hall, a gallery, a British restaurant, canteens, cafés and so forth. Assuredly we can afford this and much more. Anything we can actually do we can afford. Once done, it is there. Nothing can take it from us." (Collected Writings, vol. XXVII p. 270)
"The nineteenth century carried to extravagant lengths the criterion of what one can call for short the financial results, as a test of the advisability of any course of action sponsored by private or by collective action. The whole conduct of life was made into a sort of parody of an accountant's nightmare. Instead of using their vastly increased material and technical resources to build a wonder-city, they built slums; and they thought it right and advisable to build slums because slums, on the test of private enterprise, 'paid', whereas the wonder-city would, they thought, have been an act of foolish extravagance, which would, in the imbecile idiom of the financial fashion, have 'mortgaged the future'; though how the construction today of great and glorious works can impoverish the future no man can see until his mind is beset by false analogies from an irrelevant accountancy. Even today we spend our time - half vainly, but also, I must admit, half successfully - in trying to persuade our countrymen that the nation as a whole will assuredly be richer if unemployed men and machines are used to build much needed houses than if they are supported in idleness. For the minds of this generation are still so beclouded by bogus calculations that they distrust conclusions which should be obvious, out of a reliance on a system of financial accounting which casts doubts on whether the operation will 'pay'. We have to remain poor because it does not 'pay' to be rich. We have to live in hovels, not because we cannot build palaces, but because we cannot 'afford' them." (Collected Writings, vol. XXI p. 241)
Also like Marx, Keynes claimed actualization of the ideal social republic would require the fully "free individuality" of "universally developed individuals," this individuality including "enlightenment" defined as in Kant as the "ability to use one's understanding without guidance from another" (Keynes's idea of this also, like Marx's, substituting "reason" for Kant's idea of "understanding").
In contrast to Keynes, Marx treated the individuality characterized by an inability to think as the product of social relations and, hence, as correctable by means of a change in those relations brought about by "self-estrangement" within them working, in accordance with Hegel's "higher dialectic of the conception," ultimately to develop the degree of "integral development" - including the degree of enlightenment - imagining and creating social relations from which all barriers to full development, including the full development of the ability to think, had been removed. In this society, the "vocation" of "every person" could finally be fully realized.
"the vocation, designation, task of every person is to achieve all- round development of all his abilities, including, for example, the ability to think" http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch03g.htm#c.1.2.3
Ted