#keynes

Happy birthday John Maynard Keynes, born 5 June in 1883! Keynes is known as the father of modern economics - but not so well known is the fact that he was bisexual! Here he is, along with a few other bi figures to celebrate today for Pride.

"If machinery be the most powerful means for increasing the productiveness of labour — i.e., for shortening the working-time required in the production of a commodity, it becomes in the hands of capital the most powerful means, in those industries first invaded by it, for lengthening the working-day beyond all bounds set by human nature. It creates, on the one hand, new conditions by which capital is enabled to give free scope to this its constant tendency, and on the other hand, new motives with which to whet capital’s appetite for the labour of others.

In the first place, in the form of machinery, the implements of labour become automatic, things moving and working independent of the workman. They are thenceforth an industrial perpetuum mobile, that would go on producing forever, did it not meet with certain natural obstructions in the weak bodies and the strong wills of its human attendants. The automaton, as capital, and because it is capital, is endowed, in the person of the capitalist, with intelligence and will; it is therefore animated by the longing to reduce to a minimum the resistance offered by that repellent yet elastic natural barrier, man. This resistance is moreover lessened by the apparent lightness of machine work, and by the more pliant and docile character of the women and children employed on it."

-Keynes

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«De este modo, aunque la biología no ha sufrido las transiciones radicales de la física o la astronomía, el modo en que los biólogos “ven” su materia ha variado enormemente en dos milenios y medio. Más aún, no tenemos razón para suponer que esta evolución haya alcanzado su terminus ad quem. Por el contrario, tenemos razones para opinar exactamente al revés. Ya están empezando a poner en duda muchos biólogos el supuesto darwinista de que la naturaleza es el escenario de una guerra sin fin. En nuestro mundo postkeynesiano ésta parece una visión demasiado cruda. Conceptos derivados de la cibernética y la ciencia de la computadora, conceptos como retroalimentación, información, homeostasis, empiezan a parecer bastante más apropiados. Quizá esto presagie una nueva fase en nuestra comprensión de los fenómenos biológicos y, en consecuencia, una nueva concepción del lugar del hombre en la naturaleza».

C. U. M. Smith: El problema de la vida (Ensayo sobre los orígenes del pensamiento biológico). Alianza Editorial, pág. 34. Madrid, 1977

TGO

@bocadosdefilosofia