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# Capitalism-and-Its-Critics-A-History-From-the

> 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。

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Robinson held her views passionately, sometimes to the point of blindness. Convinced that state-led industrialization was the most viable way for underdeveloped countries to grow and throw off the yoke of colonialism, she “defended Stalin into the 1950s and 1960s,” Geoffrey Harcourt and Prue Kerr, two Cambridge-affiliated economists, wrote in a 2009 book about Robinson.63 After visiting China in 1967, she wrote a sympathetic short book on the first stages of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which she described as “a popular rising” rather than “an inner Party purge.”64 Subsequently, she reluctantly reversed course. “She was always looking for Utopia,” Harcourt, who knew Robinson personally, recalled in a 1995 interview. “She didn’t find it in Russia, then she didn’t find it in Eastern Europe, then eventually she didn’t find it in China, and she backed off on China.”65

If Robinson’s ardor sometimes led her astray, many of her strictures about postwar Keynesianism proved prescient. In her 1962 essay “Latter-Day Capitalism,” she wrote: “The Keynesian prescription for preventing recessions left an important problem unsolved—inflation.”66 In the same piece, she noted that, as far back as her 1936 book on the Keynesian theory of employment, she had pointed out that combining continuous full employment with an unregulated wage system would likely lead to a “vicious spiral,” in which wages and prices chased each other upward. By 1962, this outcome hadn’t yet materialized, but the British inflation rate had risen to more than 4 percent, generating consternation in official circles.67 The previous year, the Conservative government had reluctantly introduced a “Pay Pause” to try to limit wage inflation. Robinson noted: “It seems that the authorities … preferred to remain in a fog of confusion in order not to have to face an awkward political situation at the practical level, or to admit, at the philosophical level, that the mechanisms of a ‘free’ capitalist system are inherently incapable of regulating themselves.”68

Robinson’s analysis implied that tackling the emerging problem of accelerating wage and price increases would be far from easy. Repeating a point she had made decades earlier, she said that British labor unions operated in a highly independent fashion, and that getting them to limit their wage claims in a coordinated manner would be “a daunting task.”69 In one of her later essays, Robinson would also point out that Keynes himself hadn’t proposed any simple remedies to the inflation dilemma. “It was the bastard Keynesians who concocted bromides from his acid treatment of orthodox nonsense.”70

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As the 1960s and ’70s proceeded, and rising inflation gave new life to pre-Keynesian economic doctrines, Robinson became increasingly cast down by the state of her subject and the world. In 1970, she retired from her Cambridge professorship, but she continued to speak out on issues that concerned her. In her 1976 lecture at Barnard College, which she subsequently published as an essay, she reminded the audience of Kalecki’s 1943 warning that, in an environment of low unemployment, new institutions would have to be developed to reflect the enhanced power of the working class. “It is precisely because changes in the social and political institutions did not occur that the age of growth has been so uneasy and is now in danger of bringing itself to an end,” she said.71 During the same lecture, Robinson brought up growing concerns about environmental degradation, and economists’ failure to address them adequately. “The bastard Keynesian theory never even pretended to discuss the use of resources,” she said. “It fell back upon the old defence of laisser-faire: what is profitable is right  … The great corporations must be allowed to go on chewing up the planet, else they will not be able to make profits and provide employment.”72

By the early 1980s, Robinson was in poor health and depressed about many things, including the election of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and the subsequent intensification of the Cold War. “She saw the arms race going out of control at the beginning of the 1980s,” Geoff Harcourt recounted. “I think it was just an accumulation of things which led her to a nihilistic state of mind.”73 Early in 1982, the student economics society at University College, Oxford, invited Robinson to speak. Although she looked frail, her gaze was penetrating and her mind sharp. But her disillusionment was palpable. One student asked what she would do if she had her life to live over. She replied that she would study something more useful, such as biology.74 Later in 1982, Robinson took up a visiting fellowship at Williams College, in Massachusetts. The economist Juliet Schor, who was teaching at Williams, later recalled how, at one point, she shook the shoulders of a female student and said, “Whatever you do, promise me you won’t go into economics.”75 On August 5, 1983, Robinson died at the age of seventy-nine.

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“Nature … faithful and submissive to those who respect her”

J. C. Kumarappa and the Economics of Permanence

On May 9, 1929, J. C. Kumarappa, a thirty-seven-year-old accountant and economist who lived in Mumbai (which was then called Bombay), traveled to Ahmedabad, in Gujarat, to meet Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of the proindependence Indian National Congress. Kumarappa had recently returned to India from New York, where he had obtained a master’s degree in public finance at Columbia University. When he arrived at Gandhi’s ashram, which was located on the banks of the Sabermati River, he saw a diminutive old man clad in a simple dhoti (loincloth) sitting under a tree spinning cotton.1 Gandhi, who to hundreds of millions of Indians was a spiritual leader as well as a political one, invited Kumarappa to sit beside him. At the age of fifty-nine, the mahatma was then at the height of his influence. During the previous decade, his strategy of leading peaceful protests against British rule—satyagraha—had turned him into an iconic figure at home and abroad.

The following year, Gandhi would undertake his famous Salt March in the coastal town of Dandi, where he and his followers openly flouted the colonial laws by gathering salt on the salt flats. (Since the Salt Act of 1882, Britain had monopolized production of the mineral and imposed a sales tax on it that hurt the poor.) When Gandhi met Kumarappa, however, his mind was on economics rather than politics. Indian nationalists had long claimed that British colonial policies, particularly the tax system it had imposed, impoverished the majority of the native population. Gandhi was looking for someone to conduct a detailed survey of Matar Taluka, a poor rural area in the Kheda District of Gujarat. His goal, he later explained, was to build an “Indian economics” from the “bottom by the a posteriori method of securing rock bottom facts and drawing therefrom, by the most rigid process of reasoning, conclusions which no amount of jugglery could controvert.”2 In some ways, Gandhi and Kumarappa were very different: Gandhi was a Hindu ascetic from Gujarat; Kumarappa, a Christian businessman from Tamil Nadu, in the south of India. But they hit it off, and Gandhi offered Kumarappa the job of leading the survey.

19

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Enlisting the help of some students from a college that Gandhi had founded, he dispatched them to fifty-four villages, where they used questionnaires to inquire into every aspect of economic life, from crop choices and irrigation methods, to levels of income and indebtedness, to hygiene and health. On the basis of this research, Kumarappa put together a report that described a culture of grinding poverty, in which more than 90 percent of families in Matar Taluka didn’t earn enough money to support a basic subsistence budget and the population was steadily declining “due to a higher death rate consequent upon want of vitality and dire poverty.”3 The report described how the local farmers, who tilled modest smallholdings, were obliged to pay land taxes that in some places amounted to between 70 and 215 percent of the value of their annual crop yields: “That is, in simple language, the farmer has to pay to the Government twice what he gets from his fields.”4 Many farmers were forced to take out loans from local moneylenders at high rates of interest, which made their predicament even worse. “In other parts of the world where people labour with such low production the Government support the sufferers with doles to keep them from starvation,” the report noted archly. “But in India, the government taxes them more heavily and drives them into the quick-sands of indebtedness.”5

The report made a series of recommendations for raising living standards in Matar Taluka. They included allowing farmers to pay their taxes in kind as they had done under the Mughals, giving them the freedom to cultivate wastelands, developing local handicrafts, and creating a new organization to “draw surplus capital from the cities and make it available to the farmers” at reasonable rates of interest. The report called on farmers to “improve their methods of cultivation by avoiding all waste,”6 but it placed the main burden on the authorities, concluding: “The Government, on its part, should cease to attempt to draw blood out of stone and turn its attention to finding ways and means of helping the people out of ‘the slough of despond’ in which we find them today.”7

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Packed with facts and figures, Kumarappa’s report amounted to a searing indictment of British colonial rule. It marked the beginning of a lengthy relationship between him and Gandhi, which would last until the Indian leader was assassinated by a fanatical Hindu nationalist in January 1948, just five months after India became an independent nation. During this long association, Kumarappa worked on many of Gandhi’s projects and developed a distinctive approach to economic development, which he called “Gandhian economics.” In a series of pamphlets and books, he put forward a vision of an Indian economy based on self-sufficient local communities that would grow their own food and develop their own handicrafts industries. At a time when Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi’s successor as leader of the Indian nationalist movement, was advocating state-led industrialization to catch up with the West, Kumarappa rejected any economic strategy—be it state socialism or industrial capitalism—aimed at maximizing economic growth and embracing material values. “Modern worldly wiseacres may throw cheap gibes at the other worldliness and religious trends of the orient,” he wrote in his book, Economy of Permanence, which was published the same year as Gandhi’s death. “The enduring qualities of these civilizations are pointers to the great farsighted standards of value our forefathers had made use of, in laying the foundations of a lasting society.”8

★ ★ ★

Joseph Chelladurai Cornelius Kumarappa was born on January 4, 1892, in the ancient city of Thanjavur, where there are Hindu temples that date to the eleventh century. He came from an educated family. His grandfather was an Anglican clergyman. (The nineteenth century saw extensive efforts by British missionaries to convert Indians.) His father was an officer in the Indian Civil Service, which the British government slowly opened to talented Indians during the decades after 1858, when it formally assumed sovereignty from the East India Company. Kumarappa attended Doveton College, a Christian school in the city of Chennai (then known as Madras). In 1912, after leaving school, he moved to London, where he went by the name Cornelius, trained to be a chartered accountant, and greatly impressed his employers. “I must pay Mr. Cornelius the compliment that few Britishers have the same clever grasp of detail,” one of his bosses wrote.9

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In 1919, Kumarappa returned to India and started working in Mumbai. Six years later he cofounded his own auditing firm: Cornelius and Davar. He was also active in the local branch of the Young Men’s Christian Association. In 1927, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, Kumarappa moved to the United States, where one of his brothers was obtaining a doctorate. After studying business at Syracuse University, he enrolled for a master’s degree in public finance at Columbia University in New York. During the program, he did courses in taxation, fiscal policy, money and credit, international economics, and the history of economic thought. His teachers included two eminent American economists: Herbert J. Davenport, a former student of Thorstein Veblen, and Edwin Seligman, an expert on public finance who was also a progressive activist and a former president of the Society for Ethical Culture.

Seligman supervised Kumarappa’s master’s thesis, which was entitled “The Contribution of Public Finances to the Present Economic State of India.” In this, his first lengthy piece of scholarship, Kumarappa pointed out that the subcontinent had a large, industrious population and lots of fertile land. Why, then, was it so backward and poor? Kumarappa blamed British misrule: rather than developing India and its people, the colonists had treated the country as a tributary state—a source of extractable wealth. He pointed out how the East India Company had introduced Western-style property rights and fixed annual taxes, which many peasants struggled to pay. “In the main,” he wrote, “the exploitation policy of the East India Company was continued when the British Crown assumed responsibility for India, although it was no longer a barefaced commercial concern but was heralded by high-sounding trumpets of Divine Ordinance.”10

Kumarappa’s indictment of the British was powerful but not entirely original. In 1901 Dadabhai Naoroji, a Gujarati journalist and businessman who had moved to England and, in 1892, become the first Asian to be elected to the House of Commons, as a member of the Liberal Party, published Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, in which he claimed that Britain had long been draining wealth from the subcontinent. The following year Romesh Chunder Dutt, a retired Indian civil servant, published the first volume of a pathbreaking two-part economic history of India, in which he argued that the British “had not contributed a shilling” to the administration of its Indian empire.11 Throughout the centuries-long rule of the East India Company and the British Raj, Dutt pointed out, a steady stream of profits and tax revenues had been transferred to London, which more than covered the cost of building the Indian railroad network that defenders of British rule cited as an example of colonial benevolence. And when the British government took over the East India Company’s commercial operations during the nineteenth century, the financial burden of compensating its stockholders was placed on the Indian taxpayer in the form of loans issued by the colonial government. “The empire was thus transferred from the Company to the Crown, but the Indian people paid the purchase-money … [and do] to this day … in the shape of interest on [the] Debt,” Dutt wrote.12

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In Kumarappa’s thesis, he cited Dutt and carried out his own analysis of India’s finances. Roughly 95 percent of the national budget, he calculated, went to the Indian Army (which the British used to put down insurrections), other administrative expenditures, and debt service. These outlays left next to nothing for investing in public works and improving the lot of ordinary Indians, Kumarappa noted. He also emphasized how the policy of opening India to international trade and competition from Britishmade goods, including cottons from Lancashire, had negatively impacted many rural areas: “The old-time skilled craftsmen and artisans have lost their trade, and no industry has replaced them, but these men have been driven to the land to eke out a precarious living  … Part of the year they work, but when the dry season sets in, they are let idle.”13

After Kumarappa returned to India in early 1929, Gandhi’s Young India newspaper published parts of his thesis in a series of articles. This may have been what brought him to the attention of the Congress leader, who had always closely aligned himself with the rural poor. Gandhi’s moral creed emphasized satya (truth), ahimsa (nonviolence), aparigraha (renunciation of personal possessions), and sarvadoya (the welfare of all). In his autobiography, which was published in installments between 1925 and

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1929, he recalled how he had been greatly influenced by Unto This Last, a critical collection of essays on political economy and morality by the Victorian social critic John Ruskin. In 1908 Gandhi translated Ruskin’s essay into Gujarati, adding some commentary on its implications for Indian self-rule, or swaraj, which he invested with moral as well as political connotations. “If Swaraj cannot be attained by the sin of killing Englishmen, it cannot be attained either by the erection of huge factories,” he wrote. “Gold and silver may be accumulated but they will not lead to the establishment of Swaraj. Ruskin has proved this to the hilt.”14

Like Ruskin, Gandhi rejected the idea that the economy existed as a separate realm, with its own laws and morality. He believed that all human interactions, including economic ones, should be judged by the impact they had on other people, particularly weaker ones. In practical terms, he was constantly looking for ways to alleviate rural poverty. In 1918 he started his movement for khadi, handspun cloth, and adopted the ancient wooden spinning wheel as a symbol of rural pride and self-sufficiency. According to Percival Spear, an English historian who lived in India during the 1920s and ’30s, Gandhi “envisaged a peasant society of self-supporting workers, with simplicity as its ideal and purity as its hallmark: the state would be a loose federation of village republics.”15 But Gandhi’s public statements about economics were somewhat inconsistent. He referred to the laws of supply and demand as “laws of the devil.” However, he also criticized price controls. And despite his jeremiads against industrialization, he was politically allied with a rising class of Indian industrialists who supported the Congress Party.

Gandhi wasn’t an economist: he had trained as a lawyer. He was also deeply religious. In Kumarappa, he found an Indian economist with Western training and firsthand experience of capitalist economies who nonetheless expounded a distinctly Indian, and nonmaterialistic, view of economic development. In 1930, when the British authorities imprisoned Gandhi for inciting the salt protests that spread across the subcontinent, he called on Kumarappa to edit his weekly newspaper, Young India. In 1931 the British released Gandhi from prison and invited him to London for talks with the Labour government led by Ramsay MacDonald, which, at least in theory, was sympathetic to Indian demands for self-rule. Gandhi asked Kumarappa to prepare a report for him on the financial relationship between

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India and Britain, which he did. The talks in London didn’t get very far, though. In 1932, following the collapse of the Labour government and its replacement with a more conservative National Government, the British authorities in India introduced another crackdown. Since Kumarappa was now a known associate of Gandhi, they arrested him and jailed him for two years.

★ ★ ★

In 1934, the year Gandhi turned sixty-five, he announced his retirement from the Congress Party, but that didn’t herald his departure from public life. In December 1934 he announced the foundation of an All-India Village Industries Association (AIVIA), which had as its goal “the revival, encouragement and improvement of village industries, and the moral and physical advancement of the villages of India.”16 Emphasizing AIVIA’s ties to the countryside, Gandhi located its headquarters in the small town of Wardha, in central India, where the railroad lines from Bombay to Calcutta and Madras to New Delhi crossed. The plan was to establish a campus of workshops and laboratories and classrooms, where hand-based techniques of production could be developed and studied. To run AIVIA, Gandhi appointed Kumarappa, who left his home in Bombay, moved to Wardha, and used his new position to expand upon the ideas about economic development that he had put forward in his graduate thesis and his report on Matar Taluka.

Kumarappa, like Gandhi, viewed the ancient Indian village as the subcontinent’s key economic institution. Unlike the socialists in the Congress Party, who wanted to urbanize and industrialize the country as quickly as possible, following the Soviet example, Kumarappa and Gandhi were searching for a way to preserve and lift up the villages and their inhabitants. Making India’s countless farms more productive was obviously central to this goal, but Kumarappa also wanted to build up small-scale manufacturing and handicrafts at the local level. One of his main goals at AIVIA was to replace commercially made goods with village-made equivalents, such as the homespun cotton—khadi—that Gandhi had long promoted. “Khadi in the place of mill cloth, village earthen pots instead of factory-made china, reed-pen instead of steel pen, hand-made paper  … leather goods made in villages out of village-flayed cattle instead [of] tanned hide, the ordinary village gur instead of factory sugar, hand-pounded whole rice,” one of AIVIA’s pieces of literature explained.17 To get this process started, the new organization recruited agents across India to study the economic strengths and weaknesses of local areas and submit a report on how they could be developed. The agent’s job went beyond mere reporting. He (the agents were invariably men) should also “induce reliable merchants to store village products for sale, at prices mutually fixed between the merchants and the agent,” the AIVIA article explained, and “carry on an intensive propaganda to create a favorable public opinion for the program in his area.”18

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