Maurice Dobb

Political Economist

T. Shenk

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137297020
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Policy
• Index: Economics

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.

1

The Making of a Marxist

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.

Inventing fictional worlds protected Dobb from the cruelties of the real one. His novels were romances, tales filled with stories of English adventurers and their assorted heroic triumphs. They were the type of books that many boys his age read, if not wrote.¹ He sent completed drafts of his novels to his aunts, trying to forge a substitute for the relationship with his mother he had lost.

Like his father, Dobb took solace in Christian Science, which taught him that any illness, even the death that had stolen his mother, was an illusion.² Sickness was merely the distortion of a reality that, correctly understood, manifested God’s thought and obeyed absolute, eternal laws. From an early age, Dobb accustomed himself to living in accord with the dictates of a marginalized religion that demanded absolute loyalty and promised eventual salvation, all justified with claims to scientific precision. The skills and way of being in the world – a sociologist might call it the habitus – he developed in these years would serve him better over the course of his life than his teenaged self could have imagined.³

Despite its theological quirks, Christian Science was, like so much else in Dobb’s life, thoroughly middle class – or, in language that would soon become familiar to him, petty bourgeois. His home in Willesden, then a London suburb, fit the description perfectly.⁴ It was paid for by profits from Walter’s draper’s retail business, a profession Walter had inherited from his father. Elsie, too, came from a family of merchants. Both were conservative in their politics, dutiful in their religion – Presbyterian before Walter’s conversion – and apathetic about the culture that enchanted the young Dobb. Their aspirations for their son, though, were high, and they saw education as the foundation for a successful future. Dobb himself was less enthused and produced middling academic work for most of his childhood.

Mediocre grades did not prevent him from winning a spot at Charterhouse, one of London’s public (or, as they are known in the United States, private) boarding schools. Founded in 1611, Charterhouse included among its alumni – “Old Carthusians” – a seemingly endless number of bankers, academics, barristers, physicians, government workers, and businessmen. In an autobiographical reminiscence from the 1960s, Dobb would describe Charterhouse tersely as “an English public school of the second rank.”⁵ While he was a student, though, Dobb’s view was considerably more favorable, even ecstatic. Shortly before graduating, Dobb recalled his “entrancing” first visit and “the beauties and wonders that dwell there.”⁶ His memory of the day seems to have been painted with pastels. He saw a school “alive with colour and interest and youthful activity.” The vivid green of the field – affectionately, if not inventively, known as “Green” – stood out to him. So did the “pink blazers and caps” of some uniforms “blending in little groups with the blue and chocolate” of others. The students were “fresh, youthful, and beautiful in a blaze of pink and white.” Charterhouse’s traditions – best symbolized by an “old and fungus-eaten stone” bearing “names and dates that carry our memories back two centuries” – were equally enchanting. Youthful vitality combined with ancient ritual, athletic skill joined to intellectual achievement: this was a world Dobb ached to be a part of.⁷

But fungus-eaten stones and the students whose glories they attested to soon lost their glamour. The boys he had admired from a distance seemed to vanish when he got too close, replaced by snobs and bullies. Dobb, who demonstrated little aptitude in either athletics or academics for the bulk of his time at Charterhouse, kept to himself. He watched uncomfortably as his classmates, with the encouragement of their teachers, bragged about the number of German corpses they would be responsible for once they graduated and claimed their rightful places as officers in the Army. Beginning in 1915, he also listened, along with his other classmates, to the recitations in morning religious services of recently graduated Carthusians killed in battle at a time when the life expectancy of public school graduates dispatched to the front could be measured in weeks – six, to be precise.⁸

Dobb was a patriot, the kind who just a few years earlier had devoured accounts of British heroics in the Boer War or the adventures of men like Charles Gordon, known for repressing the Taiping Rebellion and for his time as Governor-General of the Sudan. But he was also the kind of patriot, and the kind of child, who after reaching the end of Gordon’s story and learning that his hero died in action would break into tears. Even years later, that disposition made it unlikely that the would-be warriors among his classmates would ever fully accept him.

With military service appearing an increasingly likely byproduct of his graduation, Dobb started to think seriously about politics. As he complained at the time, he did so “without finding any support” from his fellow students, or his teachers. He received more encouragement from the only Labour supporter he could find at Charterhouse – one of the servants. A lecture at Charterhouse from the Oxford classicist Gilbert Murray defending pacifism also had a lasting influence. And he read, applying the same energy to learning about politics that he had once reserved for his fictions.⁹

His academic performance improved, aided by a teacher who, as Dobb gleefully related to some of his fellow students shortly after his graduation, “gave a list of essays the boys could write if they liked, a list of books they could read if they liked,” and nothing else. Dobb relished the freedom and claimed that he “learnt more in that one term than he had ever done before.” The novice scholar toyed with majoring in classics before settling on history. Pembroke College, Cambridge, saw academic promise and rewarded him with a partial scholarship.¹⁰

Politics and history competed for Dobb’s attention with the theater. In November of 1918, students of Charterhouse witnessed the first, and last, performance of a three-act play titled “By Wireless,” written by and starring Maurice Dobb. He played Burton Galsworth, a spy who seems to have spent more time bantering with heiresses than conducting espionage. The following exchange is typical:

Galsworth:	You are fishing for compliments.
Peggy Geraldine:	I hate fishing. It bores me.
Galsworth:	Oh that’s a pity of course. I was going to suggest we went fishing to-morrow, but it’s no use now.

A picture taken at the time shows a skinny, smiling Dobb sitting with his fellow performers, other young men doing their best to appear suave, debonair, and about ten years older than they actually were – all of them, that is, except for the young man playing the role of Peggy Geraldine, resting comfortably on Dobb’s lap.¹¹

The debut performance of “By Wireless,” of course, was far from the most important event in Dobb’s life to take place in November of 1918. With the Great War’s end, he could look forward to leaving Charterhouse without having to fear being sent into battle. After graduating that December, Dobb found himself with nine months at home before starting at Cambridge, time that his father allowed him to spend as he wished. Dobb seized this opportunity to immerse himself in London’s burgeoning socialist milieu.

* * *

A few decades earlier, Britain had almost no socialist movement to speak of. By the time Dobb became politically aware, however, young radicals had an eclectic native tradition they could celebrate. Labour activists, Fabians, Guild Socialists, anarchists, and representatives of Marxism’s competing factions jostled together. Individuals slid with ease between the radical organizations – the Independent Labour Party, the British Socialist Party, the Socialist Party of Great Britain, the Workers’ Socialist Federation, and more – that flourished in this period. Even the Labour Party adopted a constitution that demanded “the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production.” The numbers of the truly radical were small, but they were growing. What mattered most was that would-be revolutionaries thought – knew – history was on their side.¹²

Dobb was one of them. He took particular inspiration from William Morris, John A. Hobson, and George Bernard Shaw. Others in his cohort turned just as readily to Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Henry Hyndman, Sylvia Pankhurst, Edward Carpenter, or fondly remembered heroes like Joseph Dietzgen. Meanwhile, English translations of key socialist texts, above all the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, grew more accessible with each passing year.¹³

Many – and not just those on the left – were convinced that these works provided essential guides to postwar Europe. Protest in the streets, the armed forces, and the factory floor swept across the continent in 1917. It was a prelude to four extraordinary years that, in the words of the historian Geoff Eley, witnessed the only “pan-European revolutionary crisis” of the twentieth century “in which popular uprisings for socialism seemed to have a chance.” The Russian Revolution followed hard on Europe’s own unrest, with Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks seizing Petrograd in November 1917. Mutinies, strikes, and seemingly countless other varieties of rebellion spurred the formation of democratic constitutions across Central and Eastern Europe. Even Britain saw voting rights expanded in 1918 to nearly all men and, for the first time, some women.¹⁴

Socialist parties boomed, filled with new recruits worried, as one enthusiast put it, “that the revolution would be over before we were ready to take a leading part in it.” With the arrival of a new epoch apparently imminent, socialism captured some of the brightest minds of a rising generation, including many whose respectable bourgeois backgrounds mirrored Dobb’s own: Walter Benjamin (born 1892), Max Horkheimer (born 1895), Galvano Della Volpe (born 1897), Herbert Marcuse (born 1898), Henri Lefebvre (born 1901), Theodor Adorno (born 1903), and Jean-Paul Sartre (born 1905).¹⁵

In the first months of 1919, a friend looking for Dobb might have discovered him foraging through left-wing bookshops looking for a new volume on socialism or pamphlet on the Russian Revolution; attending lectures given by the socialist economic historian R.H. Tawney at the London School of Economics; toiling for the Information Committee of the ILP under the supervision of the Marxist economist Emile Burns; debating the merits of the Second and Third International; marching in strikes; sitting in the Albert Hall as part of a “Hands-off Russia” campaign; or volunteering at the headquarters of the Hampstead Labour Party and the ILP, where he became friendly with workers and, he recalled with pride, “actually spoke on one occasion at a street corner meeting.” As a child, Dobb had been quiet and shy. But that part of his childhood seemed far away when he was declaiming in front of supportive crowds, both speaker and audience overwhelmed with the conviction that revolution was at hand. Socialism promised a better future, but this experience alone would have been a kind of liberation.¹⁶

It is unlikely, however, that Dobb came across any of his new socialist comrades at the library of London’s prestigious Westminster School, where he spent the last Friday and Saturday of September 1919. Westminster was hosting the second annual meeting of The Commission of Public Schools. Dobb attended in his capacity as president, where he presided over meetings of the commission’s members – current students or recent alumni of London’s elite schools – dedicated to subjects like the “The Sexual Morality of Public School Boys.” After a lengthy discussion that included calls for “fuller and detailed” sexual education courses, the commission moved to an examination of the controversial issue of “cribbing.” Dobb was silent on the sexual morality of public school boys, but, ever the progressive, insisted that greater student autonomy would reduce the likelihood of cheating.¹⁷

His political energies had to find a different outlet. Perhaps out of habit, he turned to writing, composing a short article on a visit to a private gentleman’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: The Communist Party Economist
• 1 The Making of a Marxist
• 2 An Unfinished Page
• 3 Captain of His Earth
• 4 Marxism Today
• 5 Developments
• 6 Debates
• 7 Poznań Mementos
• 8 In Transition
• Conclusion: At Trinity Chapel, and After
• Notes
• References
• Index