KANT, Immanuel (1724-1804)
German idealist philosopher who has historically played an extremely negative role in
ethics and philosophy in general, and whose influence has also adversely affected Marxism
at times. [More to be added.]
See also entries below, and:
philosophical doggerel about
Kant.
KANTIAN AGNOSTICISM
[To be added...]
KANTIAN ETHICS
There are several strands to Kant’s theory of ethics. He started from the
idealist position that there is some inherent “voice of
conscience” which establishes the truth about what is right or wrong, where reason cannot.
(This is factually completely wrong; we know very well that the
consciences of different people can give them very different
and opposed views about what is right or wrong, that the conscience is originally programmed
for you by the attitudes of your parents and others around you when you are very young, and
that the conscience can even be reprogrammed later.) Kant also believed in religious fashion
that the world must ultimately be one of freedom and justice, and—seeing that there is much
injustice around us—believed that this must mean that there is another life after this in
which God can “redress the balance”.
Thus Kant absurdly believed, from religious
impulses, that moral principles are a priori knowledge,
which are not learned, but which a person knows by instinct. (However, he did allow that a
person may learn through experience how to apply these moral principles and how to
actually do what is right.)
While perceiving that morality could not be
based on individual self-interest, Kant became fixated on the notion of absolute moral laws
which must take a universal form. He viewed moral principles as a question of absolute duty
which every person must be guided by no matter what the consequences. Ludicrous as it is, he
actually believed that moral principles (or moral maxims)
must have no exceptions whatsoever. Thus he maintained that lying is always
wrong even if someone will be injured or murdered if you tell the truth in some situation.
Kant’s famous (notorious?) doctrine of the categorical
imperative forms the heart of his theory.
Kant opposed any form of
naturalistic ethics which bases morality on human concepts,
on our social existence, and on our collective needs and interests. As such, Kantian ethics
is profoundly opposed to the Marxist-Leninist Class
Interest Theory of Ethics.
See also:
DEONTOLOGY
KANTIAN IDEALISM
[To be added...]
See also:
A PRIORI,
DING-AN-SICH
KAUTSKY, Karl (1854-1938)
German skin-deep socialist theoretician and leader, who became a renegade from Marxism.
[More to be added...]
KEYNES, John Maynard (1883-1946)
A famous liberal British economist and diplomat. He represented the British Treasury in
international negotiations during and after both the First and Second World Wars.
Keynes’ most famous work is his General
Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), often called the General Theory
for short. [More to be added.]
See also below, and:
BASTARD KEYNESIANISM.
KEYNESIAN DEFICIT FINANCING
Keynes rejected the standard bourgeois economic dogma, known as Say’s
Law which holds that capitalist production always creates its own markets. (I.e., that it
automatically creates a market equal to the full value of all the commodities produced.)
However, he thought the failure of capitalism to do this was just a sometime thing,
which could be controlled and circumvented by the goverment overseers of the capitalist economy.
(He did not at all understand, let alone agree with, the Marxist theory of
surplus value and how its very generation ensures that
capitalist production is never able to create markets equal to the full value of the
commodities produced under this system.)
When “gluts” or
overproduction did appear, along with a recession and rising
unemployment, Keynes said that one major way to eliminate these problems was to “prime the
pump” (i.e., get things working “properly” again) by having the government hire the unemployed
and pay them wages from either money borrowed from the rich, or else from money that the
government just prints up instead of obtaining it from taxes. He thought (quite erroneously)
that once things were running smoothly again, the government could start running surpluses
instead of deficits, and—with proper management—over time the deficits and surpluses would
even out, and this procedure could be applied indefinitely.
In his General Theory magnum opus Keynes argued
that the public works projects were not themselves essential and were merely a side benefit.
The real boost to the economy was due to the government budget deficits themselves and the
putting of money (in whatever way) into the hands of those who would actually spend it. He
even stated (correctly!) that it would work just as well to hire workers to dig useless
holes, and then fill them up again! The point was to somehow get money into their
hands which they would then spend.
Although “Keynesian deficits” are named after
Keynes, he was not the first to come up with the idea. Other bourgeois, and especially social
democratic, economists in Germany and Sweden not only came up with the same basic idea before
Keynes, but even started using it to good effect before Keynes wrote his General Theory.
In Sweden, for example, Gunnar Myrdal talked the government there into applying deficit
financing which greatly mitigated the Depression, and a similar thing happened in Germany.
[The Marxist view of Keynesian deficit
financing and its limits... To be added.]
KNOWLEDGE
[To be added... ]
See also below and:
HUMAN KNOWLEDGE.
KNOWLEDGE — Certain
[To be added... ]
See also:
AGNOSTICISM, and
the essay “Do We Know For
Certain That the Earth Goes Around the Sun?”.
“But are there any truths which are so securely based that any doubt
of them seems to us to be tantamount to insanity? That twice two makes four, that the
three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, that Paris is in France, that
a man who gets no food dies of hunger, and so forth? Are there then nevertheless
eternal truths, final and ultimate truths?
“Certainly there are.... If it
gives anyone any pleasure to use mighty words for very simple things, it can be asserted
that certain results obtained by these sciences [mathematics, astronomy, mechanics,
physics and chemistry] are eternal truths, final and ultimate truths; for which reason
these sciences are known as the exact sciences. But very far from all their
results have this validity.” —Engels, Anti-Dühring (1878), MECW 25:81. [Note
that of course Engels’ comment that the sum of the three angles of a triangle equal two
right angles is only valid in Euclidian geometry. —S.H.]
“Truth and error, like all thought-concepts which move in polar opposites, have absolute validity only in an extremely limited field..., and as even Herr Dühring would realize if he had any acquaintance with the first elements of dialectics, which deal precisely with the inadequacy of all polar opposites.” —Engels, Anti-Dühring (1878), MECW 25:84.
KOLKHOZ (Plural: KOLKHOZY)
A collective farm in the Soviet Union; a cooperative of multiple peasant families who were
paid on the basis of the quantity and quality of the labor contributed. After 1929, when the
rapid collectivization of Soviet agriculture began, the kolkhoz became the dominant
form of agricultural enterprise. During the pre-World War II period a kolkhoz included
an average of about 75 households, but starting in 1949 many kolkhozy were merged
together and by 1960 each one included about 340 households. Although the chairman of each
kolkhoz was nominally elected, in practice they were usually appointed by the regional
government authorities.
Soviet agriculture also had separate “Machine
Tractor Stations” which provided mechanical farming equipment services to the collective farms,
but these were merged with the enlarged kolkhozy in 1958. By 1961 each collective farm
had production quotas negotiated with the State Procurement Committee, as determined by
centrally planned agricultural production goals for each region, and sold their products to
the state agencies at contracted prices. Production in excess of those quotas, and from small
garden plots operated by individual families, was sold on the kolkhoz market at
prevailing market prices.
KONDRATIEV, Nikolai D. (Also spelled: Kondratieff) (1892-1938)
Russian semi-Marxist proponent of the existence of long-term economic waves, often called
Kondratiev Waves after him. (See below.) In the early 1920s he engaged in a theoretical
dispute with Leon Trotsky over this issue, in which both his and
Trotsky’s arguments left more than a little to be desired.
Kondratiev was a member of the peasant-based
Socialist-Revolutionary Party before the October Revolution, and briefly a member of the last
Kerensky government. After the Revolution he focused on academic research, and in 1920 founded
the Institute of Conjuncture. (Modern advocates of “conjuncture
theories” please note!) He was a proponent of the Soviet New Economic
Policy (NEP) and argued for the primacy of agriculture and consumer goods rather than heavy
industry in order to develop the Russian economy. By 1927 he no longer had any influence on
Soviet economic policy.
While it is no doubt true to say that
Kondratiev was not really much of a Marxist, his treatment by the Stalin regime was quite
outrageous. According to the Wikipedia, he was arrested in July 1930 and accused of being a
member of an illegal and proably non-existent “Peasants’ Labor Party”. In August 1930 Stalin
wrote a letter to Molotov asking for Kondratiev’s execution. However he was first imprisoned
for a term of 8 years. In 1938 he was re-tried and condemned to another 10 years in prison,
but was executed on the same day the edict was issued, as part of Stalin’s Great Purge.
KONDRATIEV WAVES
Long-term economic “waves” or cycles postulated by Nikolai Kondratiev from an empirical
study of 19th century European economic history. While there were definitely periods
of economic activity above average and below average during that century, Kondratiev could give
no convincing reason for thinking that there was some internal governing mechanism for these
changes which would justify calling them “waves” or cycles. Furthermore, his empirical evidence
was so weak that he variously claimed that these long waves had a period of 45, 50 or 60
years.
Ironically, there may be good reasons for
postulating long-term economic waves during the capitalist-imperialist era! (See my work
in progress, “An Introduction to Capitalist Economic Crises”, at
http://www.massline.org/PolitEcon/crises/index.htm, especially chapters 4 and 5,
for more on this. —S.H.)
KROPOTKIN, Peter [Pyotr Alexeyevich] (1842-1921)
Russian anarchist. Though opposed to Marxism, his writings on ethics and related
topics have considerable interest, especially Mutual Aid as a Factor of Evolution
(1902) and Ethics (1922). Though weak in class perspective and revolutionary political
theory, he showed considerable insight into questions of the evolution of cooperation and the
social nature of ethics.
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