by Sylvia Nasar
But in 1936 Joan was infatuated with her poet in Aleppo, Dr. Ernest Altounyan, and intellectually in thrall with Keynes. It was only in 1939, while she was recovering from her breakdown, that she surprised Schumpeter, a regular and admiring correspondent, by taking up Marx (whom Keynes considered a bore). Her political activity during the war consisted of serving on various Labour Party advisory committees, writing Labour Party pamphlets, and working on reports. These included the Beveridge Employment Report, which was drafted by her close friend Nicholas Kaldor, the clever Hungarian LSE lecturer who, like Robinson and Hayek, wound up spending the war in Cambridge. Her assumption that the West was doomed to secular stagnation as well as recurring depressions was shared by Keynesians of all political stripes, but in 1943 she had not yet ruled out that the problem was soluble: “The problem of unemployment overshadows all other post war problems. The economic system under which we are living is on trial. The modern world has seen a great experiment in Socialist planning . . . It remains to be seen if the democratic nations can find a way to plan for peace and prosperity.”26
Like other Labour Party economists, Robinson advocated a mixture of Socialist planning and Keynesianism demand management through taxes and subsidies.27 As an advisor to the Trade Unions Congress, she argued for the nationalization of most industries on the grounds that planning required government ownership.28 Her preferred solution involved government economic planning, government control of investment, and nationalization of key industries, while allowing that “a fringe of small scale private economy might well survive in a controlled economy provided that it did not threaten to encroach too far.”29 All of this was standard for the Labour Party’s left wing. “By 1944,” one historian commented, “the wartime radicalism had passed its peak, and the proposals advanced by Kaldor and Robinson were noticeably more moderate in tone.”30 When Keynes returned from Washington in December 1945 to announce the terms of the “infamous” American loan—that he had fought so hard to win only to have it attacked furiously by both right and left—Robinson supported him publicly by acknowledging that Britain could not afford to turn down the loan or to alienate the United States.
After Labour swept to power in 1945, Robinson aligned herself with the extreme-left opposition to the leadership. Unlike the Labour government of 1931, the government of Prime Minister Clement Attlee began at once to fulfill its wartime promises to nationalize industry and create a cradle-to-grave welfare state. As unemployment faded away and real wages rose, she became more critical rather than less critical of Labour’s leadership, less focused on domestic issues, and increasingly obsessed by American power and the threat of nuclear war. The Labour landslide had not, as expected, resulted in a U-turn away from Churchill’s vehement pro-American, anti-Soviet foreign policy. According to the historian Jonathan Schneer, Ernest Bevin, the Labour foreign minister, “did not believe that substantial agreement with Russia about the shape of the postwar world was possible.” Bevin’s “primary goal, shared by most Conservatives, was to convince the Americans that they must step into the power vacuum in Europe and elsewhere created by Britain’s declining strength before the Russians did.”31
By 1950, Stalin would complain to Harry Pollitt, the British Communist Party boss, that Labour was even more “subservient to the Americans” than the Tories.32 But his attacks on the Labour Party, which began as soon as the election was over, had the effect of rallying the rank and file around the leadership.33 The party’s left wing resented the allegation that they were no better than Tories while they were waging a furious struggle in Parliament to nationalize heavy industry and create a national health system. Though still leaning toward nonalignment, the left wing was further antagonized by Soviet actions in Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, and East Germany. Already in 1946, the leadership of the Labour Party was convinced that the chief threat to peace came not from the United States but from the Soviet Union.
The hard-core Left opposed the mainstream on the issue of what would today be called human rights. It consisted of no more than a dozen or so activists such as Robinson. The bulk of the Labour Left was far more resolutely anti-Communist than political liberals in the United States. Open Communists such as D. N. Pritt and John Platts-Mills were expelled, and the CPGB’s request for affiliation with Labour was denied. As reliably a pro-Soviet figure as Harold Laski—a prominent Marxist political scientist at the LSE who served as Labour Party chairman in 1945—defended the leadership’s actions, arguing that Communists “act like a secret battalion of paratroopers within the brigade . . . the secret purpose makes them willing to sacrifice all regard for truth and straight dealing.”34 As far as most of the British Left was concerned, the wartime romance with the Soviet Union was over.
Not for Robinson. Authoritarian by temperament and disdainful of the political compromise that characterizes democracies, she was deterred neither by Stalin’s purges at home nor by his fishing in troubled waters abroad—or rather troubling waters so that he could fish. If anything, universal condemnation seemed to heighten his appeal for her. In her mind, the United States was the biggest threat to world peace. “The great question which overshadows everything is whether Russia is planning aggression, for, if not, our whole policy is nonsensical.” Accusing the United States of conflating ideological versus military aggression, she argued that “the great boom in America built up on rearmament has gone too far for comfort . . . and yet the prospect of a peaceful détente and a sudden cessation of rearmament expenditure is a menace to their economy . . . The line of least resistance is to keep on with it. That is what seems to me the biggest menace in the present situation.”35
The Marshall Plan was the bolt from the blue that split the British Left. On June 5, 1947, Secretary of State George C. Marshall gave a speech at Harvard outlining his plan. “The United States should do whatever it is able to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace.” The Marshall Plan eclipsed the IMF, which was “almost inactive,” and the World Bank, which was husbanding its resources and refusing to make loans for reconstruction. A 1949 report of the IMF’s directors “wrote a poignant epitaph for the wartime hopes of multilateralism,” observes Richard Gardner, concluding that, “dependence on bilateral trade and bilateral currencies is far greater than before the war.”36 Within a month, the Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, publicly rejected the plan at a Paris meeting of Communist bloc countries, calling it an “American plan for the enslavement of Europe.”
After the Labour Party welcomed American aid as “an important step toward a united, prosperous Europe,” Robinson was quick in her denunciation.37 On June 25 on the BBC’s London Forum, she argued that American money would “create a Western anti-communist bloc” and thus increase the chance of war, adding, “I don’t think you can say we’re going to preserve Western values by accepting dollars and splitting Europe. I think that will imperil Western values.”38 In other words, Britain should reject the offer of American aid, as the Soviets and their Eastern European allies had—a position that put her at odds with virtually the entire British Left, which rallied behind the Labour Party. The only exception was the CPGB, which attacked the Labour government for “selling out to Wall Street.”39
Robinson’s support for Stalin in the 1940s and 1950s was more puzzling—and less conditional—than Beatrice Webb’s enthusiasm in the 1930s. It was a bit like her earlier worship of Keynes, whom she seemed to have regarded primarily as an icon.40 In his 1977 book The Russia Complex: The British Labour Party and the Soviet Union, the political scientist Bill Jones estimates that there were no more than twenty or so fellow travelers in the Labour Party in 1946. Robinson’s advocacy for the Soviet Union set her apart from Laski—described by George Orwell as “a Socialist by allegiance, and a liberal by temperament”—and most of the Labour Left. It represented a repudiation of her family’s traditions, necessarily involving a degree of duplicity as well as complicit
y in others’ deception. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” Ludwig Wittgenstein had famously concluded in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Robinson spoke fearlessly when it came to her opinions yet maintained a cagey silence about the nature of her relationship to the Soviets.
In 1939 she had confessed to Richard Kahn that the “deep rift between my political and tribal loyalty had been a continuous and growing strain all these years.”41 By the time she committed herself to Moscow, her forebodings about Western decline and optimism about the dynamism of the East had become articles of faith, and the strain of divided loyalties greater than ever. Over the summer and fall of 1952, Robinson’s elated mood became more fevered and frantic. She wrote that she was discovering great secrets, including the key to her frustrating relationship with Kahn. She developed a conviction that she had discovered a hidden flaw in the foundation of economic theory that would, if people realized its existence, bring down capitalism. By fall, she was no longer sleeping, talking incessantly, obviously delusional. After a three-way consultation among Richard Kahn, Austin Robinson, and Ernest Altounyan, she was once again hospitalized, this time for six months.
Still, she recovered sufficiently to return to Moscow the following spring. Stalin was dead, and Moscow was merely the first stop on an elaborate pilgrimage that took her first to Beijing and then to a string of Russia’s third world clients, including Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. She had allowed herself to be appointed vice president of the British Council of International Trade with China, an organization with a board that consisted largely of underground CPGB members and that was suspected of serving as a conduit for CPGB funding. The group’s president was Lord Boyd Orr, the food specialist who had headed the British delegation to the Moscow conference and had been a fixture at such events.42 Possibly it was embarrassment at her role in the so-called Icebreaker Mission that made her hide behind another dignitary almost out of camera range at the “business arrangements signing” ceremony. Milton Friedman, who spent that academic year visiting Cambridge University, was baffled that an economist of Robinson’s brilliance “found it possible to rationalize and praise every feature of Russian and Chinese policy.”43
• • •
At forty-nine, Joan Robinson was more formidable than ever, part “magnificent Valkyrie,” part houri, part commissar. Imperious, intellectually intimidating, and seductive, she combined Olympian certitude with a fine sarcasm. Although she was not admitted to the British Academy until 1958 and had to wait for Austin to retire in 1965 before being appointed to a university professorship, she stepped into the leadership vacuum that resulted from Keynes’s death. She was not the only prominent Keynesian there. But while Sraffa buried himself in collecting and editing the papers of David Ricardo, and Nicholas Kaldor went on to become a political insider in the Labour Party, she defined the agenda. She dominated the men around her.
At a seminar at Oxford run by John Hicks, who later shared the Nobel with the American economist Kenneth Arrow for his work on economic growth, Robinson “kept telling him what he had said,” recalled another participant. “He got pinker and pinker and finally said with much stammering, ‘I didn’t say anything of the sort,’ to which she replied that if he didn’t say it, that is what he meant to say.”44 Unlike the catholic Keynes, who was anxious not to become too wedded to his own ideas and disliked it when his intellectual offspring became doctrinaire, Joan sought disciples. Her male tutees were either smitten or silenced. One of them recalled,
Mrs. R. would sit on a hassock, smoking with a long cigarette holder . . . wearing a peignoir, her graying hair pulled into a tight bun in the back, her intelligent eyes set in an expansive brow, focused on me. The scene bore a vague resemblance to Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein: the same heavy solidity and presence. But there the resemblance ended. Mrs. R., if not quite a dish, was certainly comely. And the difference between her and Stein was made more evident by a pen sketch which sat on a small table, next to the hassock, of a woman, stark naked, sitting on a hassock, her hands covering her face.45
For Robinson, Cambridge, England, became the anti–Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her disdain for mathematics bordered on affectation. She turned down an invitation to become president of the Econometric Society on the grounds that she could not join an editorial committee of a journal she could not read. Arthur Pigou, her old professor, called Joan “a magpie breeding innumerable parrots” and complained that she “propounds the Truth with an enormous T and with such Prussian efficiency that the wretched men become identical sausages without any minds of their own.”46 Michael Straight, whose family owned the New Republic and who was recruited by the KGB, called her “the most exciting and brilliant lecturer as far as economics students were concerned.”47
As a member of the class that had once administered the empire, Joan came of age during British imperialism’s terminal decline, and perhaps it was this sense of being on the losing side of history that fueled her determination to side with history’s winners. By the time she went to Moscow for the first time, Robinson’s new passion was economic growth, and she was already convinced that she had taken “the wrong turning” intellectually twenty years earlier when she “worked out The Economics of Imperfect Competition on static assumptions.”48 During the Great Depression, she had striven mightily to answer what she now considered to be the wrong question. Instead of asking what caused transitory unemployment, she now realized that she should have focused on what determined the wealth and poverty of nations. In retrospect, she said, she should have abandoned “static analysis” and tried instead to “come to terms with Marshall’s theory of development.”
The question of long-run growth had originally captured the attention of Keynesians, Robinson included, who were worried about long-run stagnation in the industrialized West. But several developments caused them to shift their attention to the “overpopulated, backward countries”—that is, the former colonies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.49 To begin with, postwar stagnation had not materialized. War-shattered Britain and Europe rebounded so strongly that by 1950 unemployment had virtually disappeared and wages were rising rapidly. The Left argued that the arms race had saved the market economy, but the fact remained that the economic problem was no longer a compelling rationale for Socialism in the West.
World War II had made decolonization inevitable. Britain’s financial weakness and commitment to building a welfare state at home coincided with the emergence of indigenous liberation movements. The intensifying Cold War accelerated the process by improving the third world’s bargaining power, and the growing political participation of poor countries in global organizations, including the United Nations, focused attention on “underdevelopment” as an economic problem.
The hopeful rhetoric of the Moscow conference sounds absurdly optimistic in retrospect. With one-fifth of the world’s population, China had an average per capita income roughly half that of Africa’s in 1952, and a mere 5 percent of America’s. Living standards in India, with 15 percent of the world’s population, were only marginally higher. Had anyone asked before the war, most economists would have readily conceded that poor countries could grow rich—eventually. After all, Europe had escaped the Malthusian trap of universal poverty and life on the edge of starvation by achieving economic growth just 1 or 2 percentage points faster than that of population growth.
But what hope could the European experience offer populous China, India, or the Middle East? Not only was the gulf in material conditions between the populous poor countries and the world’s richest countries unimaginably large, but, more disturbingly, the day’s poor countries were far poorer than England in the 1840s, before the real wages and living conditions of ordinary Englishmen began their remarkable cumulative rise. “There are today in the plains of India and China men and women, plague-ridden and hungry, living lives little better . . . than those of the cattle that toil with them,” T. S. Ashton wrote in 1948. “Such As
iatic standards, and such un-mechanized horrors, are the lot of those who increase their numbers without passing through an Industrial Revolution.” At the rate at which Britain, Europe, and America had escaped poverty, it would take China and India another hundred years to reach that level.
The pros and cons of central planning and state-run enterprises were not the only issue. There was also the question of international trade and investment. Was integration in the global economy or autarky the fastest path? The answer depended on what one thought had caused underdevelopment in the first place. In Victorian England a century before, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx had maintained that poverty was a new condition, far worse in Victorian than in Elizabethan England. They blamed the rich. Later, Alfred Marshall, Irving Fisher, Joseph Schumpeter, and John Maynard Keynes, among others, took a different view. They pointed out that poverty had been man’s fate long before the emergence of the modern economy. The root cause of low living standards was not a lack of resources or unequal distribution of existing incomes but an inability to use existing resources—land, labor, capital, knowledge—efficiently. Now, in most of the globe, the question was whether the poverty of nations was caused by the Western economic system or by local conditions and institutions inimical to economic growth that Western organization could cure.
Schumpeter had called the triumph of Bolshevism in a precapitalist agrarian economy “nothing but a fluke.” In her review of Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Robinson acknowledged,
May be so. But in that case the exception seems rather more important than the rule. Who knows what flukes may accompany the end of the present war? And, even if the Bolshevik fluke remains unique, there cannot be much doubt that the existence of a socialist Great Power will play at least as important a part in the development in other countries (even without any deliberate intervention in their affairs) as the more subtle processes of evolution according to the immanent characteristics of capitalism.