[lbo-talk] Butler on Derrida /Sraffa

Mike Ballard swillsqueal at yahoo.com.au
Fri Oct 29 06:54:52 PDT 2004


The "Stalinist" tag I applied to Sraffa is not a characterization of his economic views, but of his political views, based on the scant evidence I have.

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

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When I was at Michigan State, I heard that Straffa practiced "WITCHCRAFT" between having articles reprinted in "Telos" and that once upon a time, he actually had a copy of BEING AND TIME on his bookshelf placed right next to well worn copy of "MY STRUGGLE".

Mike B)

===== omnia mutantur nos et mutamur in illis all things change, and we change with them

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