Concluding Observations

Joan Robinson analysed and critiqued capitalist and, to a lesser extent, Soviet-type development in underdeveloped economies. China attracted her as an alternative. Her prescription was not significantly different from those dubbed rightist by the Maoists. This group viewed China as a backward overpopulated economy requiring sustained development of productive forces through central planning supplemented by a regulated use of the price system. To Joan Robinson also, capital accumulation was the key to development. The socialist state was capable of taking it to the desired high level by avoiding capitalist consumption and controlling population, but without imposing unbearable sacrifice on ordinary consumption. This needed a system of planning investment and managing the market. For some time she thought the Cultural Revolution was the social experiment to find a cooperative arrangement motivated by service rather than profit to overcome the bureaucratic tendency in planning and the injustice of the market system. In the post-Mao China, she returned to the central line that in her view outlasted the two-lines struggles of the past.