ABSTRACT
The Accumulation of Capital, Joan Robinson (1956), was intended to be Joan Robinson’s magnum opus. It grew out of the advances she was making on many fronts in the years of World War II and afterwards. The major influences on her were Keynes (of course); her work on Marx placed within a fruitful setting and approach by Kalecki;2 Harrod’s seminal work on dynamic theory just before (1939) and soon after the end of the war (1948); pressing real world problems associated with the postwar reconstruction of Europe; and the emergence of consciousness about development in under-developed societies in the economics profession of the developed societies. Keynes’s revolution was increasingly being accepted in both academia and government. Attention was turning from the employment – creating effects of accumulation to its capacity-creating effects. Keynes had conquered the short period in a macroeconomic sense, at least as far as his immediate colleagues and disciples in Cambridge were concerned, so it was natural that they, when account is taken of these other influences as well, should turn their attention to the long period and so to the generalization of The General Theory to the long period, see, for example Robinson (1952a and 1956: vi). Piero Sraffa, virtually unknown to even his closest colleagues and friends, was following his own revolutionary new path in economic theory, criticizing the conceptual and logical bases of the supply and demand theories in all their forms while simultaneously rehabilitating classical and Marxian political economy. His influence would not come fully into the public domain until the publication of Production of Commodities . . . in 1960. Hints of what was to come were in the Introduction in 1951 to the Sraffa with Dobb edition of the works and correspondence of David Ricardo. Indeed, for Joan Robinson, the Introduction to the Ricardo volumes brought a great flash of illumination about the nature and role of profits in advanced capitalist economies. When reprinting her ‘Essays 1953’ (originally published as ‘a little known pamphlet . . . by the Students Bookshop, Cambridge, in 1953’ (Robinson 1973: v)) in volume IV of her Collected Economic Papers (1951-1979) in 1973, she wrote:
These essays were written in a hilarious mood after reading Piero Sraffa’s Introduction . . ., which caused me to see that the concept of the rate of profit
on capital is essentially the same in Ricardo, Marx, Marshall and Keynes; while the essential difference between these, on the one side, and Walras, Pigou and the latter-day textbook writers, on the other, – is that the Ricardians are describing an historical process of accumulation in a changing world while the Walrasians dwell in a timeless equilibrium where there is no distinction between the future and the past.
