Abstract
As he vomited into a toilet after a CPGB meeting, Maurice Dobb probably realized he had made a mistake. He had wanted to write an introduction to Marxism for the general English public, something short that he could toss off in his free time. He had done similar compact summaries of Marxist thinking on a variety of subjects — European history, contemporary capitalism, introductory economics, and more — since his graduation from Cambridge almost a decade earlier. Dobb liked the genre and thought his facility with it one of his most valuable skills. The booklet, just under fifty pages and titled On Marxism Today, appeared in 1932.
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Notes
John Mcllroy, “The Establishment of Intellectual Orthodoxy and the Stalinization of British Communism, 1928–1933,” Past and Present 192.1 (August 2006), 187–230. For a lengthier survey, see also Matthew Worley, Class Against Class: The Communist Party in Britain Between the Wars (London: I.B. Tauris and Co., 2002). Matthew Worley, Norman LaPorte, and Kevin Morgan, eds, Bolshevism, Stalinism and the Comintern:Perspective on Stalinization, 1917—; 53 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) supplies a comparative perspective.
Maurice Dobb, “The Influence of Marxism on English Thought,” September 29, 1947, MHD, DD111; John Maynard Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire (London: Hogarth Press, 1927), 5. Richard Overy, The Twilight Years: TheParadox of Britain Between the Wars (New York: Viking, 2009), 50–92 and Paul Flewers, The New Civilisation?: Understanding Stalin’s Soviet Union, 1929–1941 (London: Francis Boutle, 2008) detail planning’s rising popularity in the 1930s. For a historical reconstruction of anti-fascism from the perspective of a participant-observer, see Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism, 1840–2011 (London: Little, Brown, 2011), 261–313. But for a more critical evaluation, see Samuel Moyn, “Intellectuals and Nazism,” The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 671–91.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Biren (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 30–58; Maurice Dobb, On Marxism Today (London: Hogarth Press, 1932), 7. Merleau-Ponty did not coin the term “Western Marxism,” but he did popularize it. Dobb’s explicit references to totality — a frequent theme in his work — cast doubt on Martin Jay’s claim that “Aside from several suggestive references to culture as a ‘whole way of life’ in the early works of Williams, totality did not really enter the English debate until the Althusserian wave of the 1970s.” Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 4 fn.7.
Maurice Dobb, “Britain Without Capitalists,” January 12, 1937, MHD, DD65; Anonymous, Britain Without Capitalists (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1936), 1, 41, 15; Maurice Dobb, “Communism: For and Against,” Listener, March 29 1933, 486.
Maurice Dobb, “Notes on National Liberation and Marxism,” 1935, MHD, DD56. There are surprising parallels here with James Kloppenberg’s examination of pragmatism and democracy in Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
Harry Pollitt, Serving My Time: An Apprenticeship to Politics (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1940), 149; Maurice Dobb, “The Significance of the Five Year Plan,” The Slavonic and East European Review, 10.28 (June 1931), 81.
Maurice Dobb, “Keynes on Money,” in The Cambridge Mind: Ninety Years of the Cambridge Review, 1879–1969, eds Eric Homberger, William Janeway, and Simon Schama (London: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1970), 44. For recent evaluations of Keynes and his circus, see Luigi Pasinetti, Keynes and the Cambridge Keynesians: A ‘Revolution in Economics’ to be Accomplished (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) and the essays collected in Roger Backhouse and Bradley Bateman, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Keynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Robert Diamond, Robert Mundell and Alessandro Vercelli, eds, Keynes’s General Theory After Seventy Years (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Among older works, Elizabeth Johnson and Harry Johnson, The Shadow of Keynes: Understanding Keynes, Cambridge, and Keynesian Economics (Oxford: Basic Blackwell, 1978) is especially perceptive, while Peter Clarke, The Keynesian Revolution in the Making, 1924–1936 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) draws important attention to the relationship between Keynes’s theory and his political practices. The rigorous excavation of the debates surrounding The General Theory and the contemporary Cambridge fixation on imperfect competition has made G.L.S. Shackle, The Years of High Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967) a touchstone, but also see David Laidler, Fabricating the Keynesian Revolution: Studies of the Inter-war Literature on Money, the Cycle, and Unemployment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Peter Hall, ed., The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism Across Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989) surveys Keynesianism’s political consequences. Maria Marcuzzo and Annalisa Rosselli, eds, Economists in Cambridge: A Study through their Correspondence, 1907–1946 (New York: Routledge, 2005) does not live up to its ambitious title, but the letters open a window on the discussion at Cambridge spurred by The General Theory.
E.A.G. Robinson, “Keynes and His Cambridge Colleagues,” in Keynes, Cambridge, and The General Theory: The Process of Criticism and Discussion Connected with the Development of The General Theory, eds Don Patinkin and J. Clark Leith (London: Macmillan Press, 1977), 27. On The Economics of Imperfect Competition, see Nahid Aslanbeigui and Guy Oakes, The Provocative Joan Robinson: The Making ofa Cambridge Economist (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 86–155.
Maurice Dobb, “A Few Notes for Discussion Concerning the Keynes Theory,” February 1938, MHD, DE8. In Dobb’s words, The General Theory “was seldom comprehensible except to specialists who had followed a particular discussion about price-levels and the causes of unemployment over the previous six to ten years. I couldn’t understand what it was driving at for some time; and it’s supposed to be my job to teach it!” Maurice Dobb to Andrew Rothstein, January 23, 1946, MHD, CB24.
Maurice Dobb, “An Economist From Poland,” Daily Worker, March 22 1939, 8. Or, as Dobb put it in a letter, he preferred Kalecki to Keynes because the former presented “many of the same ideas from a different approach, and in more rigorous & precise and (to my mind) clearer form.” Maurice Dobb to Andrew Rothstein, January 23, 1946, MHD, CB24. For an introduction to Kalecki, see Julio LOpez and Michael Assous, Michal Kalecki (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1997), xii; Maurice Dobb, An Introduction to Economics (London: Gollancz, 1932), 132.
See M.C. Howard and J.E. King, A History of Marxian Economics: Volume 2, 1929–1990 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 18; Dobb, Political Economy, 121.
Oskar Lange, “Review of Political Economy and Capitalism: Some Essays in Economic Tradition,” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science / Revue canadienne d’Economique et de Science Politique 4.2 (May 1938), 267, 263; Abba Lerner, “From Vulgar Political Economy to Vulgar Marxism,” Journal of Political Economy 47.4 (August 1939), 557–67.
Maurice Dobb to C. Franklin, June 9, 1950, MHD, CA189. Perhaps revealingly, Dobb did not let Sraffa read Political Economy until he was ready to send it off for publication.
Maurice Dobb, “Socialist Movement and War,” Winter 1939–1940, MHD, DD80; Dobb, “What the Communist Party,” 446.
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© 2013 Timothy Shenk
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Shenk, T. (2013). Marxism Today. In: Maurice Dobb. Palgrave Studies in History of Economic Thought Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137297020_5
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