ABSTRACT
Keynes (1919, 1931. 1933) was both scathing and patronizing on Marx, the writer of ‘an obsolete textbook which I know to be not only scientifically erroneous but without interest or application to the modern world’ and the spawner of the ‘turbid rubbish of the Red bookshops’. Joan Robinson (1942) came to think otherwise, not only offering an expository primer on Marx but also arguing (inconclusively in my close reading of her and Kalecki) that Marx led Michal Kalecki to an early and independent anticipation of Keynes’s General Theory. (On my summing up, Kalecki by 1933 had arrived about where Kahn had been in 1931, but no mechanisms that he could have read in the several million words of Karl Marx paralleled or particularly resembled Kalecki’s attained profitincome multiplier mechanisms.) Keynes humoured Joan’s Marx book but conceded no merit in its object.
