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2013 | Book

Maurice Dobb

Political Economist

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About this book

This book explores the life of the man whom even his critics acknowledged was one of the world's most significant Communist economists. From his outpost at the University of Cambridge, where he was a protégé of John Maynard Keynes and mentor to students, Dobb made himself into one of British communism's premier intellectuals.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter
Introduction: The Communist Party Economist
Abstract
In 1925, Maurice Dobb was a young man with a freshly minted PhD, a lectureship in economics at the University of Cambridge, and a problem. He had just been asked by one of his mentors, Dennis Robertson, if he would like to become an Assistant Director of Studies at Trinity College. The title was not a sinecure — actual teaching would be required — but it provided some obvious perks, including an institutional affiliation with one of the hubs of Cambridge economics and a bump in his paycheck. Delighted, he accepted Robertson’s proposal.
Timothy Shenk
1. The Making of a Marxist
Abstract
Maurice Dobb was a novelist before he became an economist. But he started writing novels — along with essays, short stories, and plays — before he did many things, including finish puberty. The words began to pour out from him shortly after the death of his mother, Elsie Annie Moir, in 1913. Dobb was an only child, and a solitary one. Elsie’s death came at an especially difficult time, just as Dobb, born on July 24, 1900, was entering his teenage years. His father, Walter Herbert Dobb, dealt with the loss by throwing himself into mastering the tenets of Christian Science, the faith he adopted following his wife’s death. As for Walter’s son, shyness prevented him from building close friendships that might have softened his grief. He spent much of his childhood with adults — his family, his father’s friends — already cultivating the impeccable manners that would become one of his defining characteristics.
Timothy Shenk
2. An Unfinished Page
Abstract
Cambridge provided an unlikely home for an aspiring revolutionary. Outspoken advocacy of socialism put Dobb on the fringes of a political scene dominated by a massive influx of veterans — four hundred officers from the Navy alone — who had deferred enrollment in the University’s colleges for enlistment in Britain’s armed forces during the Great War. It was a nasty piece of luck for Dobb that he arrived at Cambridge when the ranks of its student body swelled with older versions of the kind of people who had infuriated him at Charterhouse. He had multiple occasions to reflect on this unfortunate coincidence in his undergraduate career — for instance, when student-veterans tossed him, fully dressed, into the River Cam; when they disrupted a meeting of the Union of Democratic Control, a pacifist organization with a local Cambridge branch that Dobb had joined; when those same students, as the conflict following the UDC meeting escalated, almost destroyed his room; or during any of the other acts of casual intimidation, harassment, and violence Cambridge authorities let slip their attention when directed at the University’s socialists.1
Timothy Shenk
3. The Captain of His Earth
Abstract
Dobb spent the second half of his twenties convinced that revolution — political, social, economic, cultural, and intellectual — was coming. He ended Capitalist Enterprise and Social Progress predicting that history had reached “a turning point,” the same phrase he used in a 1929 article to describe the state of the economics profession. But there was one part of the world where the revolution had already arrived: the Soviet Union. In 1925, Dobb visited the country for the first time. There, he caught a glimpse of what he hoped — what he knew — the future would bring. And he was dazzled.1
Timothy Shenk
4. Marxism Today
Abstract
As he vomited into a toilet after a CPGB meeting, Maurice Dobb probably realized he had made a mistake. He had wanted to write an introduction to Marxism for the general English public, something short that he could toss off in his free time. He had done similar compact summaries of Marxist thinking on a variety of subjects — European history, contemporary capitalism, introductory economics, and more — since his graduation from Cambridge almost a decade earlier. Dobb liked the genre and thought his facility with it one of his most valuable skills. The booklet, just under fifty pages and titled On Marxism Today, appeared in 1932.
Timothy Shenk
5. Developments
Abstract
Maurice Dobb had an extensive personal library, but only one of his books — The Borough of Cambridge Civil Defence Handbook — outlined steps to take during a Nazi invasion. As the handbook’s introduction explains, it was “prepared by the Civil Defence Committee for the purpose of informing Wardens and others engaged in the Civil Defence organisation to whom it is issued of the Emergency Services which have been provided” for the fight against Germany. It contained detailed descriptions of Cambridge’s wartime “CLEANSING STATIONS” built to house “persons who become contaminated with gas when away from their homes or those of their friends” along with the locations of “EMERGENCY FEEDING CENTRES,” “CASUALTY HOSPITALS,” and a “MORTUARY.” In fewer than forty pages, the handbook detailed responses to almost every conceivable emergency scenario, ranging from assault by parachuting Nazis to a gas attack. It also included descriptions of Germany’s “BOMBS, MINES, ETC.” Near the end, Dobb scrawled directions for what to do if one of those bombs exploded: “Open all unscreened windows and evacuate all unscreened rooms for 3X above distance for unburied 2X above distance for buried bombs.” “Same rules for gas bombs,” he added.1
Timothy Shenk
6. Debates
Abstract
In 1950, war broke out between North and South Korea, the most significant conflict yet in the Cold War. In 1950, Harry Truman signed a top-secret document declaring that “every individual faces the ever-present possibility of annihilation” as long as “freedom” had to do battle against Soviet “slavery.” In 1950, Indians celebrated the approval of their recently independent nation’s first constitution. In 1950, Mao Zedong consolidated his hold over the newly established People’s Republic of China, the founding of which had marked the biggest advance in communism’s reach since the birth of the Soviet Union. In 1950, the French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman called for an international organization that could supervise French and German production of coal and steel; Schuman’s proposal would lead, eventually, to the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community, forerunner of the European Union. In 1950, Britain’s voters returned the Labour government to power, barely; they rescinded this stay of execution one year later, ushering in more than a decade of Conservative rule.
Timothy Shenk
7. Poznań Mementos
Abstract
Józef Stalin Enterprises — a cluster of factories in Poznań, one of Poland’s major industrial cities — operated with a precise schedule. The workday was supposed to start punctually at 6:00 AM. Authorities learned early that something had gone wrong on June 28th, 1956. At 6:30, the facility’s main siren blared and more than 80 percent of its workers commenced a strike. Their numbers swelled, and within three hours about one hundred thousand people had gathered in Poznań’s city center. The Poznań riots had begun.1
Timothy Shenk
8. In Transition
Abstract
Dobb wrote with intimidating speed, but his books tended to come in waves. The first struck in the 1920s, with the publication of Capitalist Enterprise and Social Progress followed by Russian Economic Development since the Revolution three years later. Then his output slowed, picking up only in the aftermath of World War II, when Studies in the Development of Capitalism and Soviet Economic Development since 1917 appeared two years apart. His retirement witnessed a third outpouring of creative energy. The first book arrived in 1969, the second in 1973. Both started from a seemingly simple puzzle: “The crux of the matter,” Dobb claimed, was “whether the question of income-distribution can in practice be separated from questions of production and exchange.”1
Timothy Shenk
Conclusion: At Trinity Chapel, and After
Abstract
In 1925, Dennis Robertson had assured a worried Maurice Dobb that Trinity would have a place for him as long as he gave two weeks’ notice before he bombed the chapel. Half a century later, the chapel was still intact. On October 30, 1976, it provided an appropriate venue for Dobb’s memorial service.
Timothy Shenk
Backmatter
Metadata
Title
Maurice Dobb
Author
Timothy Shenk
Copyright Year
2013
Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan UK
Electronic ISBN
978-1-137-29702-0
Print ISBN
978-1-349-45199-9
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137297020