2 
These were also the years of a strong socialist conviction 
which in the subsequent course of time has been sorely tried. 
I have hardly been influenced very much by Marx as far 
as the "pure economics" i.e. the labour value theory 
and all that is linked to it, is concerned. I preferred 
to think of profits as the consequence of the lack of 
free entry which is ubiquitous and essential in capitalism, 
insofar as you need wealth in order to set up in business, 
and there is a hierarchy of wealth, which reserves 
the opportunities of exploiting the advantage of large scale 
to the large wealth, which is scarce. Thus profit is 
a differential rent like Ricardos positional rent. 
I think this is rather easier to understand than 
the tortuous arguments about the increase in working time 
and intensity, and it meetsthe traditional economist on 
his own ground. 
These ideas are connected with my interest in the theory of 
the firm and with the role of oligopoly and concentration. 
I have once been told that I have been referred to in 
Russian literature as a "petty bourgeois economist". 
May be the description is not so wrong and it is getting 
less wrong as time goes on . I remember that KaLEcki 
once got furious with me because in a paper on profits I 
said that the small entrepreneur, being at the margin, 
earned no profits. He insisted on my taking this out of the 
paper, because he did not want to exonerate any part 
of the capitalists. For the political position of Kalecki 
it is ( however ( remarkable that he, although quite