When I was at Cambridge (where I met the great man and heard him give a talk), a friend of mine, one of Sraffa's last grad students, told me that Sraffa had Stalin's Collected Works in his rooms that were literally read to pieces, heavily annotated and with little slips of paper all over them. He also had Lenin's CW, much less read, and a bunch of Marx, only the economic stuff showing evidence of having been read, and not recently.
Also, when Sraffa died, his college mag published an obit reporting a story that I have recounted here -- asked whether he was the "fourth man" along with Philby, MacLean, and Burgess (at the time of the discussion Blunt's identity was not publically known), Sraffa made an "indescribably Italian gesture" with his hands and said, "I forget which number I was." That might have been a joke -- or an admission that he had been a recruiter for the NKVD.
jks --- Paul <paul_ at igc.org> wrote:
> I realize this is tangential to the (very
> interesting) exchange re
> Wittgenstein, etc...but I HAD to correct one factual
> point about Sraffa
> being a "Stalinist". As far as anyone knows, Sraffa
> had hardly any
> involvements in any party or any political-party
> type activities (except in
> a very broad way, as a youth in the early '20s). As
> JKS points out, his
> work is explicitly neo-Ricardian (he edited
> Ricardo's Collected Works) and
> his supporters are often associated with non-Marxist
> socialist reformism.
>
> There was of course Sraffa's friendship with Gramsci
> whom he courageously
> visited in prison (before leaving Italy entirely).
> It is important to
> remember that in the left in many countries at this
> time - post WWI - there
> was not yet the large and irreconcilable divide that
> emerged over the
> Soviet Union (and, of course, Stalin was largely
> unknown so it is a bit
> anachronistic to call Sraffa Stalinist based on this
> period). Sraffa also
> had close personal (and professional/intellectual)
> relationships with
> several key people who were forming the key Italian
> non-Marxist socialist
> parties. Indeed the famous non-marxist socialist
> Carlo Rosselli, a key
> leader of the Partito Socialista Unitario (which had
> split from the Italian
> Socialist Party in the '20s) was Sraffa's cousin and
> collaborator. Many
> people straddled what was later to become different
> camps - in the early
> 1920s the Italian Socialist Party contained almost
> all of the various
> socialist types (marxist and non-marxist; 2nd and
> 3rd International). One
> can only speculate where Sraffa would have wound up
> had he not gone into
> exile and (apparently) avoided any political
> involvements in England. This
> is akin to the large and speculative debates of how
> Gramsci would have
> reacted to "Stalinism" had he not been locked away
> and then died (except
> that Sraffa was far, far less 'political' than
> Gramsci). [There is a
> similar debate about the Peruvian early leader of
> Latin American
> socialism, Mariategui, sometimes called the 'Gramsci
> of the Andes', who
> also died prematurely in the '20s.]
>
> In fact, to me, the close interchange among various
> parts of the left in
> this period is part of what makes social and
> political thought of the
> 1920's so relevant to us today, now that the Soviet
> Union is gone. Partly
> it is like the influence of plate tectonics on
> evolution; but partly to
> remind us that we are now free to re-make our own
> ideas.
>
> Paul
>
>
>
> JKS writes:
>
> >Anyway, W was not a political theorist, true,
> although
> >he was apparently personally attracted to Communism
> >theoretically. He was a friend of the Marxist
> >(Stalinist_ neo-Ricardan economist Piero Sraffa,
> whom
> >he acknowledges in the preface to the
> Investigations.
>
> and in a later post writes:I like the story about
> why Sraffa stopped talking to
> >W. (I actually met Sraffa in 1980-81.)
>
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