Joan Robinson: Open letter from a Keynesian to a Marxist: Tuesday Sixty Years Ago on the Non-Internet Weblogging https://www.bradford-delong.com/2013/07/joan-robinson-open-letter-from-a-keynesian-to-a-marxist-tuesday-sixty-years-ago-on-the-non-internet-weblogging.html?asset_id=6a00e551f08003883401901dbd9795970b: "Again, suppose we each want to recall some tricky point in Capital, for instance the schema at the end of Volume II. What do you do? You take down the volume and look it up. What do I do? I take the back of an envelope and work it out. Now I am going to say something still worse. Suppose that, just as a matter of interest, I do look it up, and I find that the answer on my old envelope is not the one that is actually in the book. What do I do? I check my working, and if I cannot find any error in it, I look for an error in the book. Now I suppose I might as well stop writing, because you think I am stark staring mad. But if you can read on a moment longer I will try to explain...
...I was brought up at Cambridge, as I told you, in a period when vulgar economics had reached the very depth of vulgarity. But all the same, inside the twaddle had been preserved a precious heritage–Ricardo’s habit of thought. It isn’t a thing you can learn from books. If you wanted to learn to ride a bicycle, would you take a correspondence course on bicycle riding? No. You would borrow an old bicycle, and hop on and fall off and bark your shins and wobble about, and then all of a sudden, Hey presto! you can ride a bicycle. It was just like that being put through the economics course at Cambridge. Also like riding a bicycle, once you can do it, it is second nature.
When I am reading a passage in Capital I first have to make out which meaning of c Marx has in mind at that point, whether it is the total stock of embodied labour (he does not often help by mentioning which it is–it has to be worked out from the context) and then I am off riding my bicycle, feeling perfectly at home. A Marxist is quite different. He knows that what Marx says is bound to be right in either case, so why waste his own mental powers on working out whether c is a stock or a flow? Then I come to a place where Marx says that he means the flow, although it is pretty clear from the context that he ought to mean the stock. Would you credit what I do? I get off my bicycle and put the error right, and then I jump on again and off I go...
#noted #2012-12-09
