Socialism and Planning: Development Issues

Robinson had confronted some of the problems of undeveloped countries during the two years spent with Austin in India in the 1920s. Her interest resurfaced in the post-war period, alongside her emerging theoretical work. She was a keen traveller and enthusiastic to learn about the places she visited. Robinson visited economies struggling with emergent capitalism and others following socialist objectives and plans. Their common and overriding problem was poverty, and this was usually compounded by technical backwardness and entrenched, vastly unequal distributions of income and wealth at low levels and rates of growth of output. Together, these made the domestic surplus needed to improve investment seem impossible: access to foreign sources was another extreme difficulty. The precarious state of an impoverished economy under capitalism was apparent in the many destabilising versions of capitalists’ rules in different places and times. She always advocated some form of socialism for the greater potential it had through planning, to improve output by providing greater certainty and efficiency and to make possible a more equitable distribution of the surplus (see above, Section 6). Robinson also considered that socialism allowed a more moral life, that individuals would respond to moral incentives to act out of their own interest to favour a common ‘good’ (Robinson 1962b).

After the war, Robinson (among many other Western socialists) looked to existing socialist countries with a rather uncritical and visionary trust in their futures. Robinson paid particular attention to China; over 30 years, and visiting eight times between 1953 and 1978, her thoughts on the path of Chinese socialism changed over this time as its own vision changed. At all times, she emphasised the necessity for a high rate of capital accumulation tempered by politically and humanely realistic levels and rates of growth of real wages. Population growth had to be curtailed and urgent changes made to the organisation of the agricultural sector. This was not straightforward because of its fundamental (and non-marketed) role in the well-being of the population and the scale of its reorganisation. Her interpretation of the political economy, the official policies and manner of their implementation, was controversial within China and among mainstream China scholars in the West. (For a more detailed account of her involvement with China, see Harcourt and Kerr (2009: Chapter 9) and Tahir (1990).)

After 30 years of observing and discussing the experiences of many countries, Robinson brought her views together in Aspects of Development and Underdevelopment (Robinson 1979b). Her involvement in development economics had included a critique of the mainstream, largely neoclassical approach which based its advice on an aggregate production function and a laissez-faire approach to international trade and finance. Her own analytical approach drew largely on her logical analyses and models of accumulation and distribution (Robinson 1956, 1962a) and of international trade while also taking into account her many observations and experiences of the countries she visited. This book brought together many of her long-standing political and economic grievances, particularly those connected with global capitalism, as experienced by its most helpless victims.