Sweezy: "This last group, I think, will inevitably be attracted to Marxism as the only genuine and comprehensive science of history and society. Perhaps the clearest indication that this is so is to be found in Joan Robinson’s little book An Essay on Marxian Economics published in England early in the war. … Can it be pure accident that one of the most prominent followers of Keynes should be the author of the first honest work on Marxism ever to he written by a non-Marxist British economist’?"
In the appendix to David Harvey's new book from Verso, " The Story of Capital: What Everyone Should Know About How Capital Works <https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/david-harvey-the-story-of-capital-the-verso-book-club-reading-group?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=verso_bookclub>," entitled,"Piero and me <https://x.com/profdavidharvey/status/1997331304652718099?s=20>," he says this about Joan Robinson. That appendix was originally published in NLR, under another title <https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii152/articles/david-harvey-on-sraffa-s-trail> . One of his footnotes : 7. Joan Robinson, ‘Open letter from a Keynesian to a Marxist’, <https://jacobin.com/2011/07/joan-robinsons-open-letter-from-a-keynesian-to-a-marxist-2>Collected Economic Papers, Volume iv, Oxford 1973, p. 115. "In the early 1960s, I decided to teach myself some economics. In the summer months, I often found myself driving my Mini across Europe, usually *en route* to Sweden, with a copy of Samuelson’s introductory *Economics* in the boot. One summer I drove into East Berlin through Checkpoint Charlie, just after the Wall went up. On the way out, the guards impounded the Samuelson. (I have since fancifully imagined that the corrosive effects of its circulation through the ddr played a role in ending the Cold War.) Deprived of my Samuelson, I determined to read some Keynes and was surprised to discover *The General Theory*’s fulsome acknowledgement of Sraffa’s contribution. I also learned that Sraffa was then in the process of editing *The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo*, which was surely no mean task. Sraffa was plainly not as unproductive as I had supposed. My puzzlement deepened when I discovered that Wittgenstein’s theory of language games was a result of a conversation with Sraffa on the train from Cambridge to London. Sraffa had apparently insisted that hand gestures were as much a form of linguistic communication as the spoken or written word. As Wittgenstein put it in his preface to the *Philosophical Investigations*: I was helped to realize these mistakes—to a degree I myself am hardly able to estimate—by the criticism which my ideas encountered from Frank Ramsey, with whom I discussed them in innumerable conversations during the last years of his life. Even more than to this—always certain and forcible—criticism I am indebted to that which a teacher of this university, Mr. P. Sraffa, for many years unceasingly practised on my thoughts. I am indebted to *this* stimulus for the most consequential ideas of this book.footnote3 <https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii152/articles/david-harvey-on-sraffa-s-trail#note-3> With two intellectual giants of the mid-twentieth century expressing such appreciation for Piero, my opinion of him—and of Cambridge—had to be revised. I then learned that a controversy had erupted in economics, counterposing the mit economists around Samuelson and the Cambridge school, led most prominently by Joan Robinson, who was advancing interpretations based upon the complicated mathematics that Sraffa had devised. I remembered Robinson as an astonishing presence from my student years. She was a supporter of the Chinese Revolution and wore a Mao tunic and cap around town. I had attended several of her lectures, which were obsessed with Malthusian questions of demographics and the Chinese path. Word had it that Samuelson was intimidated by Robinson, and I could understand why. She was awe-inspiring, both intellectually and as a person. My views on China were profoundly influenced by her stance towards the People’s Republic, in a period dominated by McCarthyism and the weird us debate over who ‘lost’ China (weird, in that it involved imagining a world in which China does not belong to the Chinese). In 1969, I found myself at Johns Hopkins University, where Owen Lattimore, one of three people charged by McCarthy with responsibility for China’s ‘loss’, had long taught. A formidable scholar of Inner Asia, Lattimore had decamped to Leeds a few years before; but controversy was still rife on campus as to whether he was a traitor. I eventually tracked him down for an interview in Cambridge, where he was happily anticipating a trip to Ulan Bator to receive a medal from the Mongolian Academy of Sciences. Reading the transcripts of the McCarran Senate Committee hearings, at which Lattimore was ruthlessly interrogated for eight days without access to legal counsel, confirmed for me that there is no such thing as a serious academic argument that does not have a strong political dimension. Nor is there any protection from the politics of fear that periodically works its insidious way into the seemingly reclusive world of the university. It was the Professor of Geography at Johns Hopkins who sent Lattimore’s name to McCarthy..." "Looking back at the Cambridge capital controversies, it is hard to separate out Sraffa’s contributions from those of Robinson. Sraffa appears to have avoided controversy like the plague, but Robinson fiercely embraced it. Robinson was not mathematically inclined and preferred, she said, to use her brain and intelligence instead. That meant it was easier for me to follow her arguments. She was not hostile to Marx, and published several articles in journals such as this one, but she did complain about his use of Hegel: ‘What business has Hegel putting his nose in between me and Ricardo?’footnote7 <https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii152/articles/david-harvey-on-sraffa-s-trail#note-7> Foundational to her reading of Sraffa was an emphasis upon the rate of exploitation of labour power as the motor for capital accumulation. But she also emphasized the role of the world market and wrote an introduction to an edition of Rosa Luxemburg’s *Accumulation of Capital,* which she called ‘one of the masterpieces of socialist literature’. By the 1980s this was one of my gospel texts. But here I should pause to acknowledge my own immediate interest in the questions that Sraffa posed. After publishing *Social Justice and the City*, I resolved to try to integrate Marx’s political economy into my studies of urbanization and uneven geographical development at a variety of scales, from the neighbourhood to the globe.footnote8 <https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii152/articles/david-harvey-on-sraffa-s-trail#note-8> This entailed grappling with Marx’s theorizations of ground rent, merchant capital, state investments, banking credit and finance, all the while confronting the problematics of differential turnover times and the production of time and space, in consumption as well as production. The questions of fixed-capital circulation and consumption-fund formation—for example, housing and the built environment, which formed the second part of Sraffa’s book—loomed large in my thinking. I also needed to work more carefully over the circulation and reproduction of labour capacity. These issues were explored theoretically in *The Limits to Capital*, and historically and geographically in *Paris, Capital of Modernity*.footnote9 <https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii152/articles/david-harvey-on-sraffa-s-trail#note-9> If I was to understand the role of capital in the rebuilding of Paris during the Second Empire, or in contemporary New York, then I had to understand what capital was and the different forms it might take in the built environment. If I was to take Marx’s path, then I needed to know how Marx’s definition of capital differed from that of the bourgeois economists. Robinson pointed out that the neoclassical ‘production function’—where Q, the output, is a function of labour and capital—lacks a satisfactory understanding of the units in which capital can be measured. When capital is in money form there is no problem; but capital also consists of a heterogeneous stock of use values such as machinery, plant and equipment, whose value cannot be established without invoking their impact on the value of Q. In other words, it rests on a tautology. But as Robinson noted, before the economist gets round to querying this, ‘he has become a professor, and so sloppy habits of thought are handed from one generation to the next’.footnote10 <https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii152/articles/david-harvey-on-sraffa-s-trail#note-10> The net effect is that neoclassical economic modelling is circular. And Sraffa proved it so. This is a pretty devastating finding. But the response by bourgeois economists over the years has been to ignore the problem, or to treat it as a ‘tempest in a teapot’. As Marx observed, whenever a crisis occurs, bourgeois economists simply complain that it can only be because the economy is failing to perform according to their textbooks. In fact, a few Marxist economists, led by Ian Steedman’s *Marx after Sraffa*, were the only ones to take Sraffa seriously as having undermined one of their key concepts, the labour theory of value.footnote11 <https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii152/articles/david-harvey-on-sraffa-s-trail#note-11> My view was that Steedman is correct if Marx’s theory of value is identical to that of Ricardo, the object of Sraffa’s critique. This is Steedman’s position. But Marx does something different when he insists that the ‘socially necessary labour time’ that constitutes value presumes sufficient effective demand. If the commodity cannot be sold, then there is no value (it is not socially necessary), no matter how much labour is used up in its production. In Marx’s scheme, consumerism can on occasion lead production. >From this perspective, the great divide between the utility-maximizing consumerism of the neoclassical paradigm and the class-based profit-maximizing productivism of the Robinson paradigm look more like different sides of a single coin. In my work, I have found this relation enlightening rather than troublesome. After all, urbanization is very much about individual and collective cultures of consumerism to which production incentives attach. To attribute everything to the evolution of the productive forces, as G. A. Cohen did for example in *Karl Marx’s Theory of History*, is a step too far.footnote12 <https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii152/articles/david-harvey-on-sraffa-s-trail#note-12> ..." Additional note made of Robinson, further in Harvey's text. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#40776): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/40776 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/117927517/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
