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
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Notes
Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (New York: New Press, 2005), 206, 204. Others, like Dutt, waved Stalin’s crimes away as “spots on the sun,” explaining that “To imagine that a great revolution can develop without a million cross-currents, hardships, injustices and excesses would be a delusion fit for only ivory-tower dwellers in fairyland.” Quoted in Callaghan, Dutt, 269. Also see Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (New York: Ballantine Books, 1962), an extraordinary recreation of this moment and its aftermath.
Laybourn and Murphy, Red Flag, 151.
Maurice Dobb, “Notes on Internal Dangers to Socialism,” Undated, MHD, CC4.
Maurice Dobb, “The Cold War,” 1965–1969?, MHD, DA92; Maurice Dobb to Theodor Prager, December 4, 1957, MHD, CB19; Maurice Dobb, “World Without War,” December 1958, 368; Maurice Dobb to Amartya Sen, July 21, 1961, MHD, CB26; Maurice Dobb to Stephen Bodington, November 23, 1963, MHD, CB3.
E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory: Or an Orrery of Errors (London: Merlin Press, 1995), 298, 276; Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 19, 253, 253, 254, 261, 277; Eugene Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (New York: Pantheon, 1965), 19, 158, 174, 317, 324. Genovese also cited Soviet Economic Development (on p. 64).
Maurice Dobb, “The 1957–58 Economic Crisis,” Marxism Today, October 1959, 290.
Maurice Dobb, “Britain’s Economy and its Predicament,” March 28, 1962, MHD, DA62.
Eric Hobsbawm “The General Crisis of the European Economy in the 17th Century,” Past and Present 5 (May 1954), 33–53 and “The Crisis of the 17th Century-2,” Past and Present 6 (November 1954), 44–65. On the enormous and impressive literature Hobsbawm’s essay incited, see J.H. Elliott, “The General Crisis in Retrospect: A Debate without End,” in EarlyModern Europe: From Crisis to Stability, eds Philip Benedict and Myron Gutman (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 31–51; Jonathan Dewald, “Crisis, Chronology, and the Shape of European Social History,” American Historical Review 113.4 (October 2008), 1031–52; Geoffrey Parker, “Crisis and Catastrophe: The Global Crisis of the Seventeenth Century Reconsidered,” American Historical Review 113.4 (October 2008), 1053–79; J.B. Shank, “Crisis: A Useful Category of Post-Social Scientific Historical Analysis?,” American Historical Review 113.4 (October 2008), 1090–9; and Jan de Vries, “The Economic Crisis of the Seventeenth Century after Fifty Years,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 40.2 (Autumn, 2009), 151–94.
Walt Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960).
David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972). On Rostow’s early life, see David Milne, America’s Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008), 15–72.
Maurice Dobb, “A Footnote on Rostow,” July 1960, MHD, DA52. On modernization theory, see Michael Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); David Engerman, Nils Gilman, Mark Haefele and Michael Latham, eds, Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003); Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
Stanislaw Wellisz, “Review of An Essay on Economic Growth and Planning,” Journal of Political Economy 69.2 (April 1961), 207; Robert Solow, “Review: Some Problems of the Theory and Practice of Economic Planning,” Economic Developmentand Cultural Change 10.2, (January 1962), 216, 222; Jan Tinbergen, “Review of An Essay on Economic Growth and Planning,” Econometrica 30.2 (April 1962), 399–400; Amartya Sen, “Review of An Essay on Economic Growth and Planning,” Science and Society 26.2 (Spring, 1962), 233
Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Glencoe: Free Press, 1960). For background on Bell, see Howard Brick, Daniel Bell and the Decline of Intellectual Radicalism: Social Theory and Political Reconciliation in the 1940s (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986).
Maurice Dobb, “The Course of Soviet Economic Development,” 1962–1963?, MHD, DD176; Dobb, Soviet, 335; Maurice Dobb, “Recent Economic Changes in Socialist Countries,” Marxism Today, September 1965, 269; and Maurice Dobb, “An Address: Delivered to the Degree Ceremony, Karolinum, Prague on the award of a Doctorate of Economic Science at the Charles University of Prague,” March 20 1964, MHD, DD186.
Maurice Dobb, Soviet Economic Development since 1917 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 327, 329, 512, 321, 360. Especially damaging, Dobb argued, was a reversal in analyzing “the question of the structural interdependence of the economy” and the related subject of “dynamic growth models.” Pioneering Soviet investigations of these topics in the 1920s were forgotten, robbing planners of invaluable tools. Dobb, Soviet, 358, 360. For Dobb, the retreat on growth was ironic, since he had framed the first edition of Soviet Economic Development around Roy Harrod’s studies of this issue — studies he depicted as a breakthrough in 1948 that he now insisted Soviets had anticipated in the 1920s.
Maurice Dobb, “Transition from Socialism to Communism: Economic Aspects,” Marxism Today, November 1961, 340–5. On the Soviet Union’s economic record in the 1950s, see G.I. Khanin, “The 1950s — the Triumph of the Soviet Economy,” Europe-Asia Studies 55.8 (December 2003), 1187— 211 and Elizabeth Brainerd, “Reassessing the Standard of Living in the Soviet Union: An Analysis Using Archival and Anthropometric Data,” Journal of Economic History 70.1 (March 2010), 83–117. Dobb’s confidence in Soviet growth was far from unusual. Even Harold Macmillan warned John Kennedy in private correspondence that “unless we can show that our modern free society…can run in a way that makes the fullest use of our resources” then “Communism will triumph, not by war, or even subversion, but by seeming to be a better way of bringing people material comforts.” Quoted in Glen O’Hara, Governing Post-War Britain: The Paradoxes of Progress (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 56. In US intelligence circles, however, concerns about the USSR’s growth had faded, and Macmillan’s anxiety seemed antique: Engerman, Know YourEnemy, 97–128. On the USSR under Brezhnev, see Stephen Hanson, “The Brezhnev Era,” in The Cambridge History of Russia, Vol. 3: The Twentieth Century, ed. Ronald Suny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 292–300.
Maurice Dobb, “The Revival of Theoretical Discussion Among Soviet Economists,” Fall 1960, MHD, DA6.
Maurice Dobb, “Optimal Planning and Prices,” in Papers on Capitalism, Development, and Planning (London: Routledge, Kegan and Paul, 1967), 232— 3. Note the scare-quotes around “macro-economic” — perhaps a recognition from Dobb that when he was defending this position in the 1920s and 1930s he had used the word “social” instead.
Simon Kuznets and Wassily Leontief were born in Ukraine and Saint Petersburg, respectively, but both emigrated in the 1920s. Soviet economics in this period is understudied, but see Michael Ellman, Planning Problems in the USSR: The Contribution of Mathematical Economics to Their Solution, 1960–1971 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971); Jacob Dreyer, “The Evolution of Marxist Attitudes Toward Marginalist Techniques,” History of Political Economy 6.1 (Spring 1974), 48–75; Aron Katsenelinboigen, SovietEconomic Thought and Political Power in the USSR: The Development of Soviet Mathematical Economics (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1979). On Kantorovich, see Leonid Kantorovich, The Best Use of Economic Resources (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965) and “Autobiography,” http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1975/kantorovich.html along with Johanna Bockman and Michael Bernstein, “Scientific Community in a Divided World: Economists, Planning, and Research Priority During the Cold War,” 50.3 (July 2008), 581–613 and Francis Spufford’s outstanding novel Red Plenty (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2012). Kantorovich’s work fascinated Dobb. See, for example, Maurice Dobb, “Kantorovich on Optimal Planning and Prices,” Science and Society 31.2 (Spring 1967), 186–202.
Maurice Dobb, “Review of Planning Problems in the USSR,” Marxism Today, May 1974, 41.
Maurice Dobb, Argument on Socialism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1966), 58, 15, 18, 16.
Ronald Meek, “Review of Papers on Capitalism, Development and Planning,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 131.3 (1968), 448; Alastair McAuley, “Review of Economics and Ideology and Other Essays by Ronald L. Meek; Capitalism, Development and Planning by Maurice Dobb; Planning and the Market in the USSR by Alexander Balinky; Economic Systems by Gregory Grossman,” Soviet Studies 20.2 (October 1968), 253; George Feiwel, “Review of Papers on Capitalism, Development and Planning,” American Economic Review 58.3 (June 1968), 592; and Barry Supple, “Review of Papers on Capitalism, Development and Planning by Maurice Dobb,” Economic History Review 21.1 (April 1968), 186.
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© 2013 Timothy Shenk
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Shenk, T. (2013). Poznań Mementos. In: Maurice Dobb. Palgrave Studies in History of Economic Thought Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137297020_8
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