At 09:41 AM 2/3/00 -0500, you wrote:
>Comparing Marx to Keynes is like comparing apples to oranges. I can
>understand why there would be confusion around this question on a mailing
>list focused on economic questions per se. But Marx's writings on economics
>were part of a more holistic body of work that attempted to understand the
>entire relationship of social, economic and political institutions of class
>society so as to abolish them. Keynes's interest was much more narrow.
>Looking at the workings of the bourgeois economy during the depression, he
>tried to understand what mechanisms were at work and how to correct them.
I agree with this.
>Just to repeat a point I've made numerous times here, after Marx completed
>Capital,
Marx _never_ finished CAPITAL (just as he never finished any of his major
economic-oriented books). Volumes II and III were left to be published
after his death in a somewhat incoherent and clearly unfinished state by
Engels, just as vol. IV (the THEORIES OF SURPLUS-VALUE) were published by
Kautsky.
To me this suggests the possibility of Marx-Keynes syntheses: the holistic
analysis of the capitalist mode of production of vol. I left out a lot of
the important details of finance and the like, which can be filled in using
content from the Keynesian tradition (Minsky, etc.) Of course, the fact
that Keynes wanted to save capitalism whereas Marx wanted to destroy it
will affect how this "filling in" takes place. (Keynes also had a different
class orientation, of course: he favored the elite technocrats, as part of
a liberal version of Fabianism.)
>he [Marx] turned his attention to revolutionary politics, specifically
>trying to understand what class forces could abolish feudalism where it
>still persisted, and based on that what openings existed for the working
>class in the fight for socialism. If your knowledge of Marx rests on
>Capital, and if your interest in that work is as some kind of heuristic for
>understanding finance, capital flows, etc., then you are giving Marx short
>shrift. Works like the 18th Brumaire, Class Struggles in France and
>hundreds of journalistic pieces on India, China, Poland, Ireland, etc. are
>just as important as his economic writings. One thread in his body of work
>sheds light on the other.
here it's very useful to read Hal Draper's multi-volume compendium of
(almost?) everything Marx wrote about politics, KARL MARX'S THEORY OF
REVOLUTION (Monthly Review press).
>Furthermore, some of the great Marxist thinkers of the 20th century never
>wrote about the topics found in Capital. Mariategui, CLR James, and
>Gramsci--three of the "muses" of the Marxism mailing list--never wrote
>about value theory, etc. They wrote about society, politics and history.
This is true, but these guys could have been helped by a greater
understanding of political economics. Even though Marxism is not economic
determinism, the economy is clearly very important to the story. So it's
important to be clear on these issues rather than making unsupported
assertions about the inevitability of the fall of the rate of profit and
the like. We could also list some major thinkers of the Marxian tradition
who have helped us here: Baran and Sweezy, Mandel, etc.
>One of the unfortunate legacies of the "academic turn" in Marxism is that
>it fragments his thought into compartments. You can even find this in
>mailing lists, where Progressive Sociologists and Progressive Economists
>live in separate sections of cyberspace. In order to remedy this
>fragmentation and to bring to bear the full power of Marx's method, it will
>be necessary to reconstruct a working-class revolutionary movement. That
>movement will serve as a pole of attraction to the intelligentsia, who will
>rapidly find questions of French philosophy much less interesting than they
>had in the past.
Good point.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://clawww.lmu.edu/~JDevine "Segui
il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people
talk.) -- K. Marx, paraphrasing Dante A.
