Re: Joan Robinson

[BILL MITCHELL <ECWFM@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Gary:

JR was a very caustic person. Read her interchanges with Paul D. (in his
collected works).

but I have two opinions of her.

1) she did not like marx and thought it was equivalent to sorcery. her section
on the LTV in her book Marxian Economics talks about the LTV in the imagery of
a sorcerer giving poison to a flock of sheep (i think) and then saying spells
over their dying bodies. the LTV of course to her were the spells.

2) she was a fundamental part of the destruction of the n/c theory of
production and distribution. this to me was her big contribution. i think she
led the way in showing how foolish samuelson and solow and that lot were in the
capital theory debates. strangely aggregate MPT is still taught as if nothing
ever happened.

Her book the Accumulation of Capital is still one of my favourites.

So her disrespect for marx makes her in my view a minor left figure. I place
her in that strange bourgeoise Cambridge (UK) keynesian tradition. she also did
not fully go for Kalecki who in my view was everything Keynes would have
dreamed of being in terms of developing a rich analysis of the capitalist
system. then Kalecki was trained as a marxist in poland so that probably
explains her diffidence to him.

just a few points
kind regards
bill