[lbo-talk] Open Letter from a Keynesian to a Marxist by Joan Robin son

michael perelman michael.perelman3 at gmail.com
Sun Jul 17 13:53:04 PDT 2011


Keynes's General Theory seems to have begun with his jottings on the Babylonian economy following his reading about C-M-C'. Nonetheless, he was contemptuous of Marx. I don't think Sraffa represented anything threatening. Didn't he meet him at Bernard Berenson's place in Italy? Sraffa had to leave the country .... Besides, Keynes took his "own rate of interest" chapter from Sraffa.

Did Sraffa ever write anything overtly Marxist? His Critique was a challenge to neo-classical theory rather than a promotion of Marxism.

On Sun, Jul 17, 2011 at 1:38 PM, Jim Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com> wrote:
>
> On Sun, 17 Jul 2011 12:17:11 -0700 michael perelman
> <michael.perelman3 at gmail.com> writes:
>> she told me, surprisingly, that her biggest influence was Kalecki.
>
> I think that Keynes's relationship with Marxism was more
> complicated than what he was willing to admit to.
> Although he was fierce in his denunciations of
> Marxism and the workers' movement, it was
> Keynes who was responsible for bringing to
> Cambridge both Sraffa, the friend of Gramsci,
> and Kalecki, whose views had been developed on the
> basis of a close study of the economic
> writings of Rosa Luxemburg.
>
> Some people may recall that Joan Robinson
> was widely thought to have been up for the
> Nobel Prize in Economics in 1975.  BusinessWeek
> even ran a profile on her in the expectation that
> she would get the Prize.  Instead the Prize went
> to  awarded it to the Soviet economist and
> mathematician, Leonid Kantorovich, and the American,
> Tjalling C. Koopmans, for their work in creating
> linear programming.
>
> Apparently, Robinson despite her contributions in
> such areas as the analysis of imperfect competition
> and capital theory (work which was of at least the
> same caliber as that of other economists who did
> win the Prize) was denied it because of her outspoken
> leftist, even Maoist, politics, and many say, because
> she was after all a woman.
>
> No woman had ever won the
> Prize in economics (it was only in 2009 that a woman
> finally did win the Prize). It was also said that the Nobel
> Committee was fearful that she might "pull a Sartre"
> on them and turn down the prize, possibly following
> that up with a denunciation of
> the economics profession in general.
> In fact it is reported that she went out of her way
> to reassure the Committee that she had no intentions
> of doing any such thing, but they never awarded her
> the Prize anyway.
>
>
> Jim Farmelant
> http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
> www.foxymath.com
> Learn or Review Basic Math
>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Michael Perelman
>> Economics Department
>> California State University
>> Chico, CA
>> 95929
>>
>> 530 898 5321
>> fax 530 898 5901
>> http://michaelperelman.wordpress.com
>> ___________________________________
>> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>>
>
>
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-- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929

530 898 5321 fax 530 898 5901 http://michaelperelman.wordpress.com



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