I think I agree with the gist of what you are saying,
except that Marx's main point was not that capitalism is morally
wrong, but it is an economical mechanism with a built-in
contradiction, that makes it come to a periodic and then a fatal
halt.
Same with keynesism - built on capitalist economics, still, thus
the state intervention stops the dynamics of the capitalist market
and profits - the basis for capitalist development - causing decline.
So all the moralising is secondary - the problem is, that
capitalism cannot deliver, any system built on capitalism, just
cannot deliver, the numbers who benefit are declining the same
time as incredible wealth-centralization and globalisation taking
place, just as Marx predicted - not to mention the demands of
the environmental and population issues, the cut in
resources for science and research when we are running out of time.
I've just read and interesting article in a little hungarian
magazine, saying that Marx suffered of far-sightedness,
he predicted all the symptoms of the death-throws of capitalism,
but a century or more too early.
Eva
> This post began as a simple re-telling of (what I think is)
> Solow's answer to this question. But it grew beneath my fingers
> into a more extended train of thought ... and I am loath to dump
> it all and just leave the simple reply. If you have little
> interest or no patience, just see what Solow had to say (if I'm
> right ... sorry, no citations available; I heard this tale from a
> visiting speaker) and skip the rest.
>
> The answer which I have heard -- devised I believe by Robert Solow
> (sp?) also of MIT -- is interesting in itself AND has a bearing on
> our deliberations about economic theorizing and the future of of
> history and work in general.
>
> Solow's idea is, basically, that Keynesian state intervention was
> thought up and introduced in a general context of NO significant
> monetary intervention by the state. In this context, both capital
> and labour tended (consciously or unconsciously) to be relatively
> moderate in their demands (or "self-monitoring") since they knew
> that excess could lead to economic distress and there was no power
> to alleviate the damage. In this context of relative
> self-restraint, Keynesianism *worked*.
>
> But as Keysian intervention continued to be practiced, the context
> (the reality) changed, for capital and labour could both say,
> essentially, what the hell, we'll go for it, because the state can
> always intervene and restore stability. In this NEW context --
> reality had changed -- Keynesian intervention did not work as well
> (or at all), and you got stagflation.
>
> The GENERAL point, of course, is that economic theory, like all
> social science theories, is reflexive -- it's both BY us and ABOUT
> us -- and strange things can happen. In this case, if the story is
> right, Keynesian theory started out being TRUE. But as a
> consequence of being believed (after all, it worked), it became
> FALSE!
>
> I take it that this problem of self-referral is unavoidable in the
> social sciences and the general picture of the status of our
> self-understanding has some bearing on our deliberations about
> WHAT IS POSSIBLE in the future. At the very least, this is what
> makes it all so unclear and so contentious.
>
> FOR EXAMPLE, I think that underneath the discussion, disagreement,
> and (occassional) incomprehension between Jay, Eva, and Ray, what
> is at issue is a view of human nature (gasp!) and what is possible
> for humans. Jay's view seems to hinge importantly on biological
> necessity -- our evolutionary legacy -- which he sees, I think, as
> fundamentally unalterable. With some justification, Eva sees these
> assumptions as essentially false (because too reductive) and
> distressingly self-fulfilling -- if we BELIEVE that we have no
> choice but to be agressively self-aggrandizing, then we have been
> given permission, as it were, to BE that way.
>
> Thus also Eva's impatience with repeated assertions from here,
> there, and everywhere that Marxism has been tried and failed. As I
> read it, a crucial part of Marx's theory is a historically driven
> transformation in human consciousness of itself, without which one
> gets tragedy and farce.
> Without what Marx sees as an essentially *correct* (non-Darwinian)
> understanding of ourselves as essentially social products and
> producers -- a view which both looks ahead to a bright future and
> belies his own debt to a tradition of political thought from
> Aristotle to Hegel (AND ALSO sounds alot like the political theory
> of indigenous people all over the place, if I have understood Ray
> at all correctly) -- without this crucially transformed human
> consciousness of itself, any socialist revolution will be
> premature, so to speak, and just get it wrong, producing, for
> example, not socialism or communism but a grotesque kind of state
> capitalism (which I think is something like the right reading of
> what happened in "eastern Europe").
>
> "Tragedy and farce" are, I think then, a far more correct Marxist
> verdict on the former Soviet Union than anything like simple
> failure.
>
> Almost everyone agrees that Marx gets it right about the moral
> defects of capitalist modes of production -- defects which are
> necessarily systemic -- and much of the history of the 20th
> Century is about attempts to ameliorate these defects; resistance
> to galloping globalization is the most recent version of this.
>
> In this resistance, as in our prolonged discussions about the
> future of work, I see (as through as glass darkly) the people of
> the world engaged in that historical work and political struggle
> which does involve, finally, questioning and reflecting upon our
> very "nature" as human beings and leading to a transformed
> understanding of ourselves, away from Darwinian individualism and
> towards some version of "socialism". (Or so it seems to me.)
>
> [On much of this, I highly recommend Richard c. Lewontin, _Biology
> as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA_, a nice set of lectures
> orginally offered on the CBC, AND, as some years ago: John Dunn,
> _Western Political Theory in Face of the Future_ (CUP in recently
> issued 2nd edition) (whose view of Marxism I follow in many
> respects).]
>
> Thanks for your patience!
>
> & best wishes for 1999
>
> Stephen Straker
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Vancouver, B.C.
>
>
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
