Preserving Dutch Marxism From Rigidity?

Dutch Marxist economics had already been dead a few years when someone finally delivered a funeral oration. In a lengthy polemic following the publication of Sam de Wolff’s 1929 Het Economische Getij (The economic tide), Van Gelderen, who had been a Marxist before World War 1 publishing under the pseudonym J. Fedder, mentioned the fine qualities the deceased once had, but insisted that the dead should be left to rest in peace. He wrote:

Retaining [Marxism] impedes the view on social phenomena even on questions which concern the economic struggle of the labouring class in a direct way.

(Van Gelderen, 1930, p. 875) With one or two exceptions, all socialist economists agreed and thirty- eight years passed before Van Santen ushered in the resurrection with his De Marxistische Accumulatietheorie (1968).