Edgar Hardcastle

Who was Edgar Hardcastle?

Edgar Richard "Hardy" Hardcastle was a theoretician of Marxist economics.

The son of a founder member of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, Hardcastle went to prison as a socialist conscientious objector in the First World War, formally joining his father's party in 1922. After studying at the London School of Economics under Professor Edwin Cannan, he worked all his life as a researcher in the trade union movement, first for the Agriculture Workers Union, then for a short while for the international trade union movement in Brussels, then till his retirement for the Union of Post Office Workers where he was chief adviser to a succession of UPW General Secretaries.

His main interest was monetary economics. From the 1930s on, as his Socialist Standard articles testify, he did battle against Keynes on behalf of Marx and also, more curiously it might be thought, on behalf of his old professor, Cannan. Edwin Cannan, a largely forgotten classical bourgeois economist from the Ricardian school of the first part of this century, could be described as the last of the classical political economists and, as such, shared with Marx certain economic views, in particular that inflation was a purely monetary phenomenon caused by an excessive issue of an inconvertible paper currency and that banks were merely financial intermediaries without any power to "create credit." Both of these positions were denied by Keynes whose views became part of the economic orthodoxy.