ABSTRACT
Joan Robinson's contributions on economic and social Marxian theory can produce quite different feelings in the reader. In some cases it appears that she did not find sufficient interest and concentration to achieve a thorough insight into the conceptual and analytic apparatus of Das Kapital. In other cases, instead, I believe that her style as a historian of economic thought, consisting of a fairly ironic `translation into prose' of major classic and neoclassical economists, is very effective. In particular, her method yields very interesting results for those loci of Marxian theory of value that are overloaded with aims and meanings, and that have been the foundation of so many orthodox developments. Moreover, although her rendering of Marx's thought is sometimes definitely inaccurate, Joan Robinson takes Marx's theory `seriously' and gets into details of Das Kapital that many modern readers have completely overlooked. Not only does she discuss the main theme of labour value as a first step for the determination of the rate of profit; she also takes into consideration Marx's presentation of labour value as an autonomous principle at the opening of Das Kapital, labour value in socialist economic systems, issues such as the value of agricultural products or the production of value in the circulation of commodities. I believe that this attentive and detailed reading takes us a long way from the image of Marx as an intermediate step between David Ricardo and Piero Sraffa that we get from some neo-Ricardian interpretations.
