On Joan Robinson’s Abandonment of Exploitation

After discussing and analyzing exploitation as an analytical category in The Economics of Imperfection Competition and An Essay on Marxian Economics, Joan Robinson hardly mentioned it in The Accumulation of Capital. Despite analyzing her contributions at length, the literature has completely failed to recognize this curious turn, let alone explain it. This paper explains the abandonment of exploitation by arguing that it was one way to resolve the tension between the inherently normative aspects of the concept and her increasing discomfort with conflation of ideology and analysis across the first two books mentioned above.