Ronald L. Meek

Who was Ronald L. Meek?

Ronald Lindley Meek was a Marxian economist and social scientist known especially for his scholarly studies of classical political economy and the labour theory of value.

Meek was born in Wellington, New Zealand, where he attended school and entered Victoria University in the mid-1930s, initially to study law, and later economics. There he became interested in the thought of Karl Marx, theatre and local left-wing politics. Some of his articles of that period in New Zealand journals like Spike, Salient and Tomorrow were written under pseudonyms. In 1939, he graduated with a Masters in Law. In 1944, he married a communist activist, Rona Stephenson though they were soon divorced again. Meek revealed himself to be the brightest Marxian thinker of his generation in New Zealand; his first monograph, a pamphlet called "Maori Problems Today" discussed a topic which had previously been largely ignored by the Communist Party of New Zealand.

In 1946 Meek moved to Cambridge, England with a Strathcona studentship to read for a Ph.D. under Piero Sraffa and Maurice Dobb.