Re: Joan Robinson

[Cristina Marcuzzo <marcuzzo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

G. Mongiovi writes:
>I don't know whether Joan Robinson should be characterized as a hard
or a soft leftist, according to the definitions used in previous posts.
But I have the impression that she was a NAIVE leftist in the sense that
she was wholly uncritical of the negative aspects of the Soviet and
Maoists systems.>
then he adds:
>I say "I HAVE THE IMPRESSION THAT" etc..  Can any-
one shed some light on the matter?>

JVR's involvement with marxism and socialism started quite early, when she
reviewed John Strachey's book, The Nature of Capitalist Crisis, in 1936,
accusing him of presenting the labour theory of value in terms of Say's
Law and ignoring Keynes. John Strachey (brother of Lytton) replied that he
was absurd for someone who had never read Marx to talk about him. The
story is told by JVR in an unpublished paper (in King's College
Archives) where she added:"We each felt that the other had made a fair
point. He began to read Keynes and I read Marx". In fact she started
reading Marx in 1940, to get away from the news of the war, and was
"tutored" by Maurice Dobb. Geoff Harcourt has an article on the
correspondence betewen them. Her most substantial work on the subject,
Essays on Marxian Economics, was attacked by contemporary marxists as
being burgeois and unsympathetic towards the marxist approach. A few
years later, 1950, she had another go at the labour theory of value,
reviewing the book edited by Sweezy, On the Close of the Marxian System (a
collection of essays by Bohm-Bawerk-Hilferding and Borkiewicz on the
contradiction between the first and the third volume of Das Kapital) in
which she claimed that the labour theory of value is not the heart of
Marx's system and she added "nothing that it is important in it would be
lost if value were expunged from it altogether". As a consequence,
relations with Marxists became very strained.
 Kalecki certainly helped to understand better the nature of Marx's
economics, and throughout the 50s
her work on capital accumulation and growth was strongly influenced by her
reading of Marx. In the Sixties she was involved in the founding of the
journal Co-existence (together with Myrdal) in an effort to keep open
comunications between East and Ovest.
 She went to the Soviet Union in 1951 for the first time
and to China in 1953 and if you read her reports on these experience you
can see that she was critical and sympatheic at the same time.
 After Sraffa's book came out she became more and more convinced of the
difference between classical (and marxian) approach on one hand and
neoclassical approach on the other and wrote several pieces on that.
In the late sixties she became enthusiastic about the Chinese experience,
and sometimes I feel that she overraected (but did not we all?), but
certainly she remained very critical of "religious" marxism.
In coclusion she was never a marxist, but I think that people who held in
the past strong "marxist" views, and are now more apt to accept the idea
that Marx's system can be questioned in some points, are starting revaluating
her.

maria cristina marcuzzo
marcuzzo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx