Abstract
Dobb spent the second half of his twenties convinced that revolution — political, social, economic, cultural, and intellectual — was coming. He ended Capitalist Enterprise and Social Progress predicting that history had reached “a turning point,” the same phrase he used in a 1929 article to describe the state of the economics profession. But there was one part of the world where the revolution had already arrived: the Soviet Union. In 1925, Dobb visited the country for the first time. There, he caught a glimpse of what he hoped — what he knew — the future would bring. And he was dazzled.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Raphael Samuel, Ewan MacColl, and Stuart Cosgrove, Theatres of the Left, 1880–1935: Workers’ Theatre Movements in Britain and America (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 26. Dobb had quoted Toller before in a pamphlet released by the Plebs League on European history. See Maurice Dobb, An Outline Of European History: From the Decay of Feudalism to the Present Day (London: Plebs League, 1925), 45.
William Langer, “Some Recent Books on International Relations,” Foreign Affairs 6.4 (July 1928), 689; “Russian Policies,” Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, March 10, 1928, 291; Nikolai Gubsky, “Russian Economic Development since the Revolution. by M. Dobb; Ou vala Russie by Simon Zagorsky,” Economic Journal 38.152 (December 1928), 616; S. P. Turin, “Review of Russian Economic Development since the Revolution,” Economica 23 (June 1928), 226, 224; Michael Florinsky, “Review of Russian Economic Development since the Revolution,” Political Science Quarterly 44.4 (December 1929), 599, 597–8.
Maurice Dobb to R. Palme Dutt, May 20, 1925, MHD, CB17; John Maynard Keynes to Maurice Dobb, August 22, 1927, MHD, CA105. Keynes had already published his own evaluation of the subject: A Short View of Russia (London: Hogarth Press, 1925).
John Maynard Keynes to Maurice Dobb, May 17, 1928, MHD, CA105; Keynes to Dobb, August 27, MHD, CA105.
Maurice Dobb, Russian Economic Development since the Revolution (London: Routledge, 1929), 422, 426. On the difficulties of identifying kulaks — difficulties analogous to the problems Dobb had specifying the middle class in Capitalist Enterprise —; see Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 122–3.
Quoted in Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 12; quoted in Suny, Soviet Experiment, 72; Dobb, Russian, 388, 375. The Shakhty trials are often cited as the first show trials, but for earlier precedents, see Robert Argenbright, “Marking NEP’s Slippery Path: The Krasnoshchekov Show Trial,” Russian Review 61.2 (April 2002), 249–75.
Maurice Dobb, Wages (London: Nisbet and Co., 1928).
Quoted in Pollitt, “Collaboration of Maurice Dobb,” 62. Dobb had referred to the then-unpublished manuscript of Sraffa’s “Sulle Relazioni Tra Costo e Quantità Prodotta” in a footnote to Capitalist Enterprise. Capitalist Enterprise, fn. 1, 88. But, as he later remarked, at the time “he was far from appreciating, still less emphasizing, its fuller significance.” Maurice Dobb, Political Economy and Capitalism, 193. On Sraffa, see Terenzio Cozzi and Roberto Marchionatti, eds, Piero Sraffa’s Political Economy: A Centenary Estimate (London: Routledge, 2001); Heinz Kurz, Luigi Pasinetti and Neri Salvadori, eds, Piero Sraffa: The Man and the Scholar (London: Routledge, 2008); and Alessandro Roncaglia, Piero Sraffa (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). As this abundant literature suggests, though Sraffa is little known today among mainstream economists, this is chiefly a consequence of the widespread ignorance among practicing economists of their discipline’s past. Sraffa has many followers among the heterodox, where statements like the opening of Roncaglia’s biography — “Piero Sraffa is, together with Keynes, probably the greatest economist of the twentieth century” — are not uncommon. Roncaglia, Sraffa, viii.
Quoted in Giorgio Napolitano, “Sraffa and Gramsci: A Recollection,” in Piero Sraffa: The Man and the Scholar, eds Heinz Kurz, Luigi Pasinetti, and Neri Salvadori (London: Routledge, 2008), 243; Nerio Naldi, “Two Notes on Piero Sraffa and Antonia Gramsci,” Cambridge Journal of Economics, first published onlineJuly 28, 2011, http://cje.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/07/28/ cje.ber014.full. On Sraffa’s relationship with Gramsci, also see Amartya Sen, “Sraffa, Wittgenstein, and Gramsci,” Journal of Economic Literature 41.4 (December 2003), 1240–55. For the potential timing and location of Dobb’s first encounter with Sraffa, see Nerio Naldi, “Piero Sraffa’s Early Approach to Political Economy: From the Gymnasium to the Beginning of his Academic Career,” in Piero Sraffa’s Political Economy: A Centenary Estimate, eds. Terenzio Cozzi and Roberto Marchionatti (London: Routledge, 2001), 28. It is possible that Sraffa and Dobb met earlier in a course on value theory Edwin Cannan was teaching at the LSE in the summer of 1921.
Piero Sraffa, “The Laws of Returns Under Competitive Conditions,” Economic Journal 36.144 (December 1926), 535–50 and “Sulle Relazioni Tra Costo e Quantita Prodotta,” Annali di Economia 2 (1925), 277–328; English translation by John Eatwell and Alessandro Roncaglia, “On the Relations Between Cost and Quantity Produced,” in Italian Economic Papers, Vol. 3, ed. Luigi Pasinetti (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 323–63.
Piero Sraffa, “Increasing Returns and the Representative Firm,” The Economic Journal 40.157 (March 1930), 93. For a sample of the debate over Sraffa, see Heinz Kurz, ed., Critical Essays on Piero Sraffa’s Legacy in Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Maurice Dobb, “Thoughts on May and October,” Plebs, May 1926, 171.
V.I. Lenin, “Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder,” in Collected Works, Vol. 31 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), available at Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/archive/. It is worth noting that Dobb’s position stood nineteenth-century Marxist orthodoxy on its head. The general strike had originally been an anarchist tactic — Mikhail Bakunin had endorsed it, while Marx and Engels, believing that any working-class movement capable of organizing such a protest could just take state power directly, opposed it. See Frederick Engels, “The Bakunists at Work: An Account of the Spanish Revolt in the Summer of 1873,” Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Vol. 23 (London: Progress Publishers, 1988), 581–98. The 1926 General Strike has received surprisingly little attention from historians of twentieth-century Britain. Alastair Reid and Steven Tolliday, “The General Strike, 1926,” Historical Journal 20.4 (December 1977), 1001–12 summarizes the early literature, while Keith Laybourn, The General Strike of 1926 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993) offers the fullest available treatment. For a journalist’s narrative, see Anne Perkins, A Very British Strike: 3 May–12 May 1926 (London: Pan Macmillan, 2007).
Maurice Dobb, “The First General Strike,” Plebs, June 1926, 206; Maurice Dobb, “How Are We to Prepare for ‘Next Time’?,” Plebs, September 1926, 310.
Maurice Dobb, “Working Class Politics,” 1926–1928?, DD25; Dobb, “Communism,” DD14; Maurice Dobb, “The Revolution in Art and Literature,” Plebs, November 1927, 366. Dobb listed among the defects of “bourgeois art” an “introvert preciosity and tendency to mysticism.” He might have cringed to remember of his own youthful experiments with fiction.
Copyright information
© 2013 Timothy Shenk
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Shenk, T. (2013). The Captain of His Earth. In: Maurice Dobb. Palgrave Studies in History of Economic Thought Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137297020_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137297020_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-45199-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-29702-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Economics & Finance CollectionEconomics and Finance (R0)