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Robin Foliet Neill complained of 'citing an author while moving the 
substance of the author's material into an alternative and competing 
paradigm'. But that seems to me to be what he is trying to do to Joan 
Robinson's 'Economics of Imperfect Competition'. Read the book. It is 
solidly in the Marshallian/Cambridge tradition from start to finish. It 
addressed what was a major, perceived problem for that tradition, the 
fact that the competitive model did not allow for firms to be in 
equilibrium with unexploited economies of scale. Marshall himself had 
tried to solve it with the trees and forest analogy, but that was not 
generally seen as adequate. Sraffa had pointed out the problem. There was 
a lot of empirical and anecdotal evidence (taken more seriously in 
Britain than the US, I suspect) that firms saw demand, not rising costs, 
as the constraint limiting expansion.  
 
Look at the immediate context of the work - Robinson was very young when 
she wrote it, had been trained in the wholly Marshallian Cambridge 
tradition, and discussed and developed it in that environment. Her 
mantors and contemporaries (Pigou, Keynes, Kahn, Austen Robinson) worked 
in that framework. Marx as not taken seriously. It is I suppose just 
possible that Marx played some role in inspiring the work and that she 
deliberately chose to present the work in the accepted framework, but I 
know of no evidence that would support such a hypothesis. (Is there any, 
anybody?) Her Essay on Marxian Economics came nearly a decade later, if 
memory serves, and was very much an outsider's view of Marxism. 
 
Neill points to Robinson's discussion of 'exploitation' to support the 
idea that there is something Marxist about the 'Economics of Imperfect 
Competition'. But look at the definition: exploitation is payment equal 
to marginal revenue product but less than price times marginal physical 
product (because MR < p). By this definition all factors, not just 
labour, are exploited ('the factors of production would all be exploited' 
if there were imperfect competition in all industries: p. 312). Under 
perfect competition, all factors get their marginal products and there is 
no exploitation, according to Robinson. Marxist? 
 
Sorry to be so insistent, but I was brought up on this stuff in Cambridge 
in the 60s. I was interested in Marxism, and the 'Economics of Imperfect 
Competition' was one of the first books I was set to read in my economics 
course. I never saw it as even vaguely Marxist. 
 
Tony Brewer ([log in to unmask]) 
 
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