|  Home
Subscribe
Notes From
the Editors
The Commitment of
an Intellectual: Paul M. Sweezy (1910-2004)
by John Bellamy
Foster
Paul M. Sweezy
by Michael A.
Lebowitz
Why
Stagnation?
by Paul M. Sweezy
Monopoly
Capitalism
by Paul M. Sweezy
Capitalism and
the Environment
by Paul M. Sweezy
|
A note on the text: A
version of this biographical essay was originally made available on
MR’s website a few days after Paul died and was widely referred to
by writers and journalists throughout the world. It appears here in print in
the magazine for the first time. In addition to providing an account of Paul
Sweezy’s life and work it also contains very brief biographies of Paul
Baran, Harry Magdoff, and Harry Braverman, since their contributions were in
many ways inseparable from his.—Eds.
The following brief
intellectual biography of Paul Sweezy was drafted in September 2003 shortly
before I saw Paul for the last time. It conveys many of the basic facts of his
life. But as with all biographies of leading intellectuals it fails to capture
the brilliance of his work, which must be experienced directly through his own
writings. Nor is the warmth of Paul’s character adequately conveyed here.
A short personal note is therefore needed. What was so surprising about Paul
was his seemingly endless generosity and humanity. Paul gave freely of himself
to all of those seeking his political and intellectual guidance. But a few,
such as myself, were particularly blessed in that they experienced this on a
deeper, more intense level. For decades Paul was concerned that Monthly
Review not perish as had so many socialist institutions and publications in
the past. He recognized early on that the continuance of the magazine and the
tradition that it represented required the deliberate cultivation of new
generations of socialist intellectuals. I was fortunate to be singled out while
still quite young as one of those. For decades Paul wrote me letter after
letter—no letter that I wrote to him ever went unanswered—sharing his
knowledge, intellectual brilliance, and personal warmth. It was an immense,
indescribable gift.
I first saw Paul
when I was still a teenager. He had just returned from China and was speaking
at the University of Washington in Seattle to an enormous crowd that seemed to
dwell on his every word. In my twenties when I was a graduate student at York
University in Toronto Paul took me under his intellectual wing after I sent him
a manuscript that I had written entitled, “The United States and Monopoly
Capitalism: The Issue of Excess Capacity.” My earlier work for my
master’s degree had been on the political economy of Joseph Schumpeter,
who had been Paul’s close friend and in a sense mentor, and my sharing of
that work as well brought us closer together. For the next quarter century Paul
and I communicated regularly—corresponding weekly, talking on the phone,
and conversing in person during the few occasions each year in which we were
able to get together. I visited him a number of times at his house in
Larchmont, New York. I wrote my first article for MR in 1981 on the
subject of monopoly capitalism. Soon afterwards I began working together with
Henryk Szlajfer on an edited collection of essays entitled The Faltering
Economy: The Problem of Accumulation Under Monopoly Capitalism (Monthly
Review Press, 1984) that was meant to explain the origins and development of
the monopoly capital theory. I wrote my dissertation on The Theory of
Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy, published
in expanded form by Monthly Review Press in 1986. In all of this Paul was a
constant source of encouragement. Beyond mere intellectual support, Paul’s
friendship extended to all the exigencies of life and if I had a personal or
family crisis he was always there helping with his incomparable friendship and
advice.
Very soon after I
met Paul and Harry Magdoff I began to help them with MR in all the ways
I could and by the end of the 1980s I was a director of the board of the
Monthly Review Foundation and a member of the informal editorial committee of
the magazine. In this dual capacity I saw Paul a couple of times a year. In the
year 2000 I became coeditor of Monthly Review, along with Paul, Harry,
and Bob McChesney. This was a time when Paul’s declining health had
curtailed his active involvement and Bob and I stepped in feeling it was
necessary to do what we could, together with Harry, to save the magazine. I can
imagine no more important intellectual task for a socialist than to try to
continue on the path that Paul and Harry (and in the beginning Leo Huberman)
charted. Paul was a heroic figure in the modern struggle for socialism. His
last words to me as he neared the end and faded in and out of consciousness
were “I knew you were still there.” He was referring to my
relation to MR and the struggle that it embodied. For me this was the
highest compliment. Paul’s dedication to the struggle for humanity and
socialism, which could not be separated from his love for his own family and
friends, remained with him up until the time of his death. For those of us who
knew and loved Paul the commitment to equality and justice will always run that
much deeper because it was embodied in his life, and now, in our memories of
him.—JBF
Paul M. Sweezy, referred to by The Wall Street Journal in 1972 as
“the ‘dean’ of radical economists,” was, in the words of
John Kenneth Galbraith, “the most noted American Marxist scholar” of
the second half of the twentieth century.1
Sweezy’s intellectual influence, which was global in its reach, lay
chiefly in two areas: as a leading radical economist (and sociologist), and as
the principal originator of a distinct North American brand of socialist
thought in his role as cofounder and coeditor of Monthly Review
magazine. Like both Marx and Schumpeter, to whose thought his work was
closely related, Sweezy provided a historical analysis and critique of
capitalist economic development, encompassing a theory of the origins,
development, and eventual decline of the system.
Paul Marlor Sweezy was born April 10, 1910, in New York. His father, Everett
B. Sweezy, was vice president of the First National Bank of New York, then
headed by George F. Baker, a close partner of J. P. Morgan and Company. His
mother, Caroline (Wilson) Sweezy was in the first graduating class of Goucher
College in Baltimore. He had two older brothers, Everett, born 1901, and Alan,
born 1907. All three brothers went to Exeter and then to Harvard. In the early
years, Paul followed in the footsteps of his brother Alan. Both Alan and Paul
were editors of the Exonian and then later presidents of the Harvard
Crimson. Both studied economics at the undergraduate and graduate levels at
Harvard. Paul had all but completed his senior year at Harvard when his father
died in 1931, interrupting his studies. Consequently, he did not graduate
(magna cum laude) until the following year in 1932. In 1931–32,
however, having already finished his undergraduate studies, he began graduate
courses in economics at Harvard. It was during this time that his interests
shifted decisively from journalism (an early and important influence on his
work) to economics.
In 1932 Sweezy went to England for a year’s study at the London School
of Economics (LSE). During school breaks he also studied for several months in
Vienna. These experiences changed his life and outlook considerably. Like many
he had been shaken by the onset of the Great Depression. His father had lost
the greater part of his fortune in the 1929 stockmarket crash, although enough
remained to ensure a comfortable existence. In Britain Sweezy was awakened by
the intellectual and political ferment in response to the deepening depression
and Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. His initial intention in attending
the LSE was to work with the conservative economist Friedrich Hayek. However,
in the heated debates then taking place, particularly among younger scholars,
Sweezy found himself increasingly attracted to Marxism. Lectures that he
attended by Harold Laski at the LSE and his reading of Leon Trotsky’s
History of the Russian Revolution, which had just been translated into
English, were key influences inducing Sweezy’s change in perspective. He
was also affected by the rapid developments in economics in England during this
period. It was at this time that he became acquainted with some of the younger,
left-leaning Cambridge economists, including Joan Robinson.
In 1933 Sweezy returned to the United States to continue his graduate
studies in economics at Harvard where the intellectual climate had been
dramatically transformed. Marxism, which in his prior years at Harvard had
played no part in his education, had by then become an important topic of
discussion. One big change was the arrival at Harvard of Joseph Schumpeter, one
of the foremost economists of the twentieth century. A conservative economist,
Schumpeter nonetheless had enormous respect for the economics of Karl Marx,
even going so far—as Sweezy once put it—“to build a structure of
thought which was to rival Marx. In other words he took Marx as a model in a
way.”2 Schumpeter had a small seminar of
around a half-dozen students in which Sweezy took part. Over the years the two
became fast, even legendary friends, engaged in continual intellectual
discussions and debates, in which other notable figures such as Oskar Lange and
Wassily Leontiev and later Paul Samuelson also took part. Sweezy was for two
years Schumpeter’s teaching assistant in his graduate course in economic
theory.
During these years Sweezy cofounded the journal Review of Economic
Studies and published a series of important economic essays on issues of
imperfect competition, the role of expectations in Keynesian analysis and
economic stagnation. He was deeply affected by the revolution in economics
introduced by John Maynard Keynes and incorporated aspects of Keynes’s
analysis into his thought while remaining a Marxian critic.
In September 1936 Sweezy and Abba Lerner, a young economist at the London
School of Economics, wrote a letter to the [London] New Statesman and Nation
responding to an earlier article by Keynes on British foreign policy in
that publication. They argued that the failure of Britain to oppose the fascist
powers in Ethiopia and Spain was a product of the class interest of the British
ruling class, which, while opposed to fascism generally, put the defense of
private property ahead of its national interests. Any other interpretation but
the Marxist one, they argued, would leave analysts such as Keynes, as he
himself had indicated in his article, merely “surprised at the incredible
stupidity that must be attributed to the British Foreign Office.” The two
young economists ended their letter by indicating their “very highest
admiration for Mr. Keynes’ work in our field. We think he has done more
than any other writer in our time towards laying bare one of the deepest
contradictions of the capitalist economy, the coexistence of willing hands and
open mouths.” Keynes replied that the explanation for these shortcomings
of British foreign policy was the “unqualified pacifism” of much of
the British public. “Those who fail to observe it and interpret everything
in terms of Capitalist and Communist theory are blind to their
surroundings.”3
After Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
was published in 1936, Sweezy became a very active participant in the
Harvard discussions surrounding the Keynesian revolution in economic theory. At
the same time he married a young economist, Maxine Yaple.
During this period Sweezy worked for various New Deal agencies. In 1937 he
carried out an important study of “Interest Groups in the American
Economy” for the National Resources Committee (NRC), which was published
in 1939 as an appendix to the NRC’s well-known report, The Structure of
the American Economy. In opposition to Berle and Means’s claim that a
large number of U.S. firms were management controlled, Sweezy argued that it
was possible to discern eight leading “interest groups” consisting of
industrial and financial alliances. In the first group he listed the investment
banking firm of J. P. Morgan and Co. and its alliance with the First National
Bank, in which his father had worked. Sweezy also carried out research for the
Security and Exchange Commission on their study of monopoly in 1939, and for
the Temporary National Economic Committee, which was charged with analyzing
issues of competition and monopoly in the U.S. economy in 1940.
Sweezy’s first formal economic publication was “Professor
Pigou’s Theory of Unemployment” published in the Journal of
Political Economy in 1934. Over the course of the 1930s he wrote more than
twenty-five articles and reviews on economic topics. Two of the papers that he
wrote in this period were to be of lasting importance. The first was his
article “Expectations and the Scope of Economics” in the Review of
Economic Studies in June 1938. The second was his classic article,
“Demand Under Conditions of Oligopoly,” in the Journal of
Political Economy, August 1939. The earlier article reflected the Keynesian
concern with expectations under conditions of economic disequilibrium and
uncertainty. The second introduced the famous “kinked demand curve”
theory of oligopolistic pricing, which explained why oligopolistic prices tend
to go only one way—up. Both of these themes were to play a large role in
the later theory of monopoly capital, as developed by Sweezy and Paul Baran.
The kinked demand curve hypothesis originally developed out of Sweezy’s
1937 dissertation Monopoly and Competition in the English Coal Industry,
1550–1850, which won the David A. Wells prize and was published in the
following year by Harvard University Press. Schumpeter was on Sweezy’s
dissertation committee.
In 1938 Sweezy became an instructor at Harvard. During these years he and
his brother Alan helped in the founding of the Harvard Teacher’s Union, a
branch of the American Federation of Teachers. In addition to teaching the
principles of economics and a course on corporations, he took over a course on
the economics of socialism formerly taught by Edward Mason. It was in the
process of developing the lectures for this course that he wrote his seminal
work The Theory of Capitalist Development: Principles of Marxian Political
Economy (1942). He later explained that it had required an enormous
struggle on his part to shift from the marginal utility analysis that he had
learned through classic texts by figures like Harvard’s Frank Taussig, to
Marx’s labor theory of value. This was a shift in thinking that could not
be accomplished in a day or even a year, since each of these frameworks raised
entirely different sets of questions. In drafting the manuscript for The
Theory of Capitalist Development he received help from the Japanese
economist Shigeto Tsuru, who was then studying at Harvard and provided an
appendix on Marx’s reproduction schemes for the book. This classic work is
still used to teach Marxian analysis to students in economics. More than simply
a textbook it made a number of pioneering contributions, including: its
emphasis on the qualitative (not simply quantitative) value problem in
Marx’s treatment of the labor theory of value, its elaboration of the
Bortkiewicz solution to the transformation problem; and its discussions of
crisis theory and monopoly capitalism. Its introduction also provided what was
to be an influential explanation of Marx’s method.
The most important conclusion of The Theory of Capitalist Development
had to do with the long-run stagnation of investment under capitalism
arising from a built-in tendency in the system toward the overaccumulation of
capital. “Stagnation of production, in the sense of less-than-capacity
utilization of productive resources,” Sweezy wrote, evoking a theme that
was to repeat itself again and again in his work, “is to be regarded as
the normal state of affairs under capitalist conditions. If this view is
adopted the whole crisis problem appears in a new light. Emphasis shifts from
the question: ‘What brings on crisis and depression?’ to its
opposite: ‘What brings on expansion?’” The Theory of
Capitalist Development appeared in the same year as Schumpeter’s
Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy and the two works can be seen as two
sides of a complex debate on the future of capitalism and socialism. Schumpeter
referred numerous times to Sweezy, and in particular to The Theory of
Capitalist Development, in his History of Economic Analysis (1951),
where he “strongly recommended” Sweezy’s book, “as an
admirable presentation of Marx’s (and most of the neo-Marxists’)
economic thought.”
Both Sweezy’s Theory of Capitalist Development and
Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy were concerned
with the question of economic stagnation that had become a pressing issue
during the sharp recession of 1937 when unemployment leapt from 14 percent to
19 percent. Prior to this it had been assumed by most economists that recovery
from the depression would occur continuously “of itself” (as
Schumpeter put it) until full recovery was reached. The fact that the economy
had instead sunk once again in 1937, well before full recovery, therefore came
as a great shock generating a far-reaching debate over the reasons for
stagnation. The question was most famously posed in the title of an important
1938 book, Full Recovery or Stagnation?, by Alvin Hansen, then the most
prominent Keynesian economist at Harvard. Still, it took more than
Keynes’s General Theory and fears of continuing economic stagnation
to propel Washington toward “Keynesian” economic policies. Crucial in
this respect in the context of the recession of 1937 was a small book written
by a number of Harvard and Tufts economists entitled An Economic Program for
American Democracy, which became a Washington bestseller. Paul Sweezy and
his wife, Maxine Yaple Sweezy, were among the authors and signatories.
Paul Samuelson, winner of the first Nobel Prize in Economics, later recalled
a debate in the late 1930s between Joseph Schumpeter and Paul Sweezy, “the
foxy Merlin” and the “young Sir Galahad,” at a time “when
giants walked the earth and Harvard yard.” Sweezy, Samuelson wrote,
“was the best that Exeter and Harvard can produce...[and] had early
established himself as among the most promising economists of his
generation....Unfairly, the gods had given Paul Sweezy, along with a brilliant
mind, a beautiful face and wit....If lightning had struck him that night,
people would truly have said that he had incurred the envy of the gods.”
Samuelson recalled “the interchange of wit, the neat parrying and thrust,
and all made the more pleasurable by the obvious affection that the two men had
for each other despite the polar opposition of their views.”4 Both saw the tendency toward stagnation as evidence
that capitalism would inevitably fade. For Schumpeter this was because of
political controls placed on the system. For Sweezy it was due to the
contradictions embodied in capitalism’s own economic development, where
capital, as Marx said, was the main barrier to capital itself.
Sweezy’s admiration for Schumpeter’s economics, despite the
radical differences in their assessments of capitalism, was made explicit
elsewhere and on numerous occasions. In a review of Schumpeter’s great
1939 work Business Cycles in the Nation (February 3, 1940) Sweezy
wrote that, “Better than any economist since Marx, Professor Schumpeter
has succeeded in viewing capitalism as essentially a transitory historical
epoch with its own ethos and its own laws of development.” In an important
article, “Professor Schumpeter’s Theory of Innovation,”
published in The Review of Economic Statistics (now The
Review of Economics and Statistics) in February 1943, Sweezy explained
the essence of his debate with Schumpeter. Schumpeter argued that innovation
should be seen as the stimulus to profits and accumulation, resting on the
sociological role of the entrepreneur. In contrast, Sweezy insisted that
innovation should be seen as subordinate to the accumulation process.
Others, besides Samuelson, recalled the stagnation debate and the
interchanges between Schumpeter and Sweezy at this time as great moments in
their own lives. Galbraith later referred to Sweezy as “a dominant
voice” in the debates on stagnation and the future of capitalism of the
1930s. Tsuru said that in his “‘sacred decade of twenties’
(Schumpeter’s stock phrase),” Sweezy was “the kingpin in the
Golden Era of the Harvard Economics Department in the 1930s.”5
With the United States entering the Second World War, Sweezy was anxious to
play an active role in the fight against fascism. In the 1930s he had been a
member of the League Against Fascism and War and various popular front
organizations. He left Harvard to join the army in the fall of 1942. Shortly
before he enlisted he and Maxine Yaple divorced.
Sweezy went into the army as an officer candidate and was assigned to the
Office of Strategic Services (OSS) working under his former Harvard professor
and colleague Edward Mason. He went to work in Washington in the summer of
1943. In the late fall 1943 he was sent to London to join the Research and
Analysis program of the OSS there, where his immediate superior was another
noted U.S. economist, Chandler Morse. Sweezy’s chief role was to keep an
eye on British economic policy for the U.S. government. He met frequently with
economist James Meade, who was in the British economic warfare agency. It was
clear that the war would result in a reorganization of world economic relations
and that the United States was interested in coming out of the war, as Sweezy
was to recall, as the “top dog.” At that time Britain was still
considered to be the number two economy and the whole question of what to do
with the British Empire had not yet been decided. Sweezy later regarded his
experiences in the war as reflecting the whole of U.S. policy toward its allies
with regard to postwar planning and the constitution of U.S. hegemony that was
described in Gabriel Kolko’s The Politics of War.
The Research and Analysis section of the OSS produced reports and analyses
of developments in particular countries that were distributed to several
hundred military agencies and commands in the European theatre of operations.
The London branch of the Research and Analysis section had been publishing for
some time a newsletter that was a weekly summary of what was happening in the
Axis countries, derived mostly from the German press, but also from other
occupied areas. This information was collected in neutral Portugal and then
channeled into London. Sweezy began working on the newsletter and turned it
into a monthly magazine—called the European Political
Report—that drew on an expanded range of sources. The newsletter took
an explicitly New Deal-leftist, antifascist stance. For example, it adopted a
very anti-British position on the 1944 British assault on the Greek resistance.
Having encountered Sweezy in London in those days, economist Tibor Scitovsky
later recalled that he had mentioned how much he enjoyed the work on the OSS
magazine, and that he had declared his desire to start his own magazine when he
returned to the United States after the war.6
The London branch relocated to Paris in the winter of 1944–45 and then to
Wiesbaden in the spring. Later some of his branch relocated to Berlin, where he
witnessed the devastation caused by the allied bombing.
In September Sweezy was sent home and demobilized. He had reached the rank
of second lieutenant and was awarded the Bronze Star Medal in 1946. The
citation specified that the medal was for his role as editor of the European
Political Report.
After the war, Sweezy received a Social Science Research Council
Demobilization grant, which was designed to allow scholars who had been in the
military to resume their research. He settled in Wilton, New Hampshire and
married Nancy Adams, his second wife, who he had met in London in 1944. They
had three children: Samuel Everett (born 1946), Elizabeth (Lybess) MacDougall
(born 1948), and Martha Adams (born 1951).
During these years he made occasional trips to Cambridge, Massachusetts to
use the library and settled down to a life of study, writing frequently for
the Nation, the New Republic and other publications. He spent six
months reading the first six volumes of Toynbee’s Study of History,
which he greatly admired, reviewing it for the Nation. At the same time
Sweezy wrote his book Socialism (1949) as well as most of the essays
that were to appear in The Present as History (1953). Shortly after
Schumpeter’s death in 1950 he edited and introduced a book of two of
Schumpeter’s essays, which were translated for the first time by Heinz
Norden, under the title Imperialism and Social Classes. He ended his
introduction by “paying his respects” to his great friend: “He
is gone now, and neither Harvard nor the economics profession will ever be the
same again.” Sweezy also edited a volume containing three classic works on
the transformation problem of Marxian economics: Karl Marx and the Close of
his System by Eugene Böhm-Bawerk; Böhm-Bawerk’s Criticism
of Marx by Rudolf Hilferding; and “On the Correction of Marx’s
Fundamental Theoretical Construction in the Third Volume of
Capital” by Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz (which Sweezy translated into
English from the original German). In his 1950 critique of Maurice Dobb’s
Studies in the Development of Capitalism in the pages of Science
& Society, Sweezy, following Marx, emphasized the role of the world
market in the decline of feudalism and launched the famous debate over the
transition from feudalism to capitalism that has played a central role in
Marxist historiography ever since.
One issue for Sweezy at this time was whether he would resume his teaching
position at Harvard and whether he would pursue a career as an academic. Having
taken a military leave during the war, he still had two years left on his
five-year contract as an assistant professor at Harvard. During the war a
tenured position in economics at Harvard had opened, where it was necessary to
appoint someone immediately. Sweezy was one of the two candidates considered
for the job. The other was John Dunlop, who subsequently became a well-known
labor economist and Secretary of Labor in the Ford administration. Schumpeter
was a very strong supporter of Sweezy’s candidacy. Schumpeter wrote to
Dean Paul H. Buck in May 1945 that Sweezy’s The Theory of Capitalist
Development was “a masterly exposition of the Marxian system of
thought” and that “this task...has been attempted by dozens of
economists of all countries [but] has never before been done so well.”
Responding to criticisms that Sweezy was a Marxist, Schumpeter wrote to the
dean: “Whether we accept Marxian economics or not, it is of sufficient
importance in economic thought to justify the task of propounding it from the
standpoint of which it was conceived.”7
Dunlop, however, received the tenured appointment. After his return from the
war, Sweezy inquired among his friends in economics at Harvard about the
chances of his securing a tenured position. It was made clear to him, no doubt
partly based on these prior circumstances, that there was then no chance of the
appointment of a Marxist. Sweezy later insisted that if he had not been so
fortunate as to have had access to surplus value through his family inheritance
he would probably have been forced like so many others to succumb to the kinds
of controls and pressures inevitably exerted on those who earn their livings in
the academy. As it happened, however, he was under no such need to conform and
he chose not to resume his former teaching position.
The persistent dream of starting a monthly magazine also helped draw Sweezy
away from a university-based career. After the war he was in frequent contact
with Leo Huberman, whom he had known since the 1930s. Huberman was an
accomplished labor educator, journalist, and writer of best-selling histories
of economic development and labor struggles. He had been chairman of the
department of social sciences at New College of Columbia University, labor
editor for the newspaper PM, a columnist for the magazine U.S.
Week, and director of education and public relations for the National
Maritime Union. His most popular books were We, the People (1932),
Man’s Worldly Goods (1936), which sold more than half a million
copies, The Labor Spy Racket (1937), and The Truth About Unions
(1946). Huberman and Sweezy started fantasizing in the late 1940s about
starting a political magazine, but saw no opportunity to make it concrete. This
changed near the end of 1948. Among Paul’s closest friends was the great
Harvard literary scholar F. O. Matthiessen, the author of American
Renaissance (1941) and a founder of American Studies. They had worked
together in establishing the Harvard Teacher’s Union and had remained in
touch ever since. After the demise of Henry Wallace’s 1948 presidential
campaign, in which Huberman, Sweezy, and Matthiessen had all been involved,
Matthiessen, who had heard Huberman and Sweezy talking about their desire to
start a new magazine, visited Sweezy in New Hampshire and told him that he had
inherited some money that he had no personal need for and offered them $5000
each year for three years in succession to start the magazine. The result was
Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine, the first issue of
which appeared in May 1949 with an article by Albert Einstein entitled
“Why Socialism?” Otto Nathan, an economist who had been a left Social
Democrat in pre-Nazi Germany before he migrated to the United States obtained
the article from Einstein. Nathan was a friend of Huberman’s and was for a
short time a silent coeditor.
Unlike most socialist publications that once conceived expire quickly,
Monthly Review flourished from the beginning, and currently is in its
fifty-sixth year of publication. By the end of its first year the magazine had
about 2,500 subscribers. Total circulation peaked in 1977 at around 12,000. In
the 1980s and early ’90s circulation ebbed as radical publications in
general went into decline, falling to less than 5000 by 1996. The magazine
began a comeback in the late 1990s, its circulation rising to over 7,000 in
2003. Monthly Review’s readership, however, has always been
considerably beyond what its U.S. circulation numbers would suggest. It was
once referred to as “the most famous unknown magazine in
America.”8 Copies are frequently
circulated by hand literally across the globe. It has been published in
Italian, Spanish, and Greek editions—all of which have now expired.
Currently a low-cost edition is being printed in India. Editorial Hacer in
Barcelona now publishes two 160-page issues each year of Monthly
Review—Selecciones en castellano, a collection of recent and classic
MR articles, translated into Spanish.
Monthly Review has often been characterized as the leading
independent Marxist periodical in the English-speaking world, if not in the
world as a whole. Always charting its own way it stayed clear of the ideology
of the Soviet bloc, refusing to adopt any party line. From the start, its
reputation was grounded in its economic analysis. In a portrait of the editors
in 1963, Business Week magazine called Huberman and Sweezy’s vision
in Monthly Review “a brand of socialism that is thorough-going and
tough-minded, drastic enough to provide the sharp break with the past that many
leftwingers in the underdeveloped countries see as essential. At the same time
they maintain a sturdy independence of both Moscow and Peking....Their skill at
manipulating the abstruse concepts of modern economics impresses would-be
intellectuals...their analysis of the troubles of capitalism is just plausible
enough to be disturbing.” Monthly Review’s “influence
abroad,” Business Week contended, “was out of proportion to
their U.S. following.”9 In the 1960s a
survey sponsored by Time International (a Time Inc. publication)
revealed that Paul Sweezy was one of the ten Americans that Japanese business
leaders and opinion makers “would most like to meet.”10
The magazine was never, however, simply an economics publication. It took as
its responsibility the need to provide a critical assessment of “the
present as history,” and was noted too for its political and historical
and occasional cultural analyses. Its authors frequently looked like a
Who’s Who of the left, including such figures as: Albert Einstein,
W. E. B. Du Bois, Shirley Graham, Jean-Paul Sartre, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara,
Malcolm X, Edgar Snow, I. F. Stone, R. H. Tawney, G. D. H. Cole, Henry Wallace,
William Appleman Williams, Eduardo Galeano, Anna Louise Strong, C. Wright
Mills, Lorraine Hansberry, Anne Braden, Daniel Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky, E. P.
Thompson, Michal Kalecki, Joan Robinson, Isabel Allende, and Samir Amin, among
many others. Coming into existence in the same year as the Chinese Revolution,
Monthly Review was distinguished from the start by its focus on
imperialism and revolution in the third world. Huberman and Sweezy opposed and
critically dissected the Korean War from the beginning. The first Review of the
Month (the article-length, lead editorial that sets the tone for the magazine)
devoted to the Indochina War was written in 1954. When Ned O’Gorman
returned from a U.S. State Department trip to Latin America in 1964 he wrote in
the National Catholic Reporter, “The Monthly Review’s
editors, Huberman and Sweezy, Edgar Allen Poe, Walt Whitman and JFK are the
Americans I hear most spoken of in South America.”11 In 1966 MR received the City of Omega Award, a
literary prize awarded by a committee of former Italian-resistance fighters and
previously won by Jean-Paul Sartre and Franz Fanon. The award citation
declared: “The fundamental genius of these two writers lies in a Marxist
humanism. In the world’s struggle against capitalism and imperialism there
has been neither an argument nor an event which has not found in the works of
Huberman and Sweezy an interpretation of high intellectual caliber and
painstaking lucidity.”
In the 1950s the principal concerns of Monthly Review were the Cold
War abroad and McCarthyism at home. Huberman and Sweezy were never naïve
enough to assume that the McCarthy era was simply a “red scare.” It
had its larger meaning in the attempt to smash the old New Deal coalition
between labor, farmers, and civil rights activists. Not surprisingly, both
editors were targets of the inquisition in this period. Huberman was called
before Senator McCarthy’s committee in 1953. New Hampshire Attorney
General Louis C. Wyman, who was charged by the state legislature with
investigating “subversive activities,” subpoenaed Sweezy on two
occasions in 1954. The investigation focused on a lecture that Sweezy had
delivered at the University of New Hampshire, as well as Sweezy’s role in
the 1948 Progressive Party presidential campaign of former U.S. Vice President
Henry Wallace. Sweezy had served as chairman of the Wallace campaign in New
Hampshire.
Taking a principled stand against the proceedings on First Amendment
grounds, Sweezy refused to answer questions on the membership and activities of
those who had participated in the Wallace campaign; the contents of his guest
lecture at the University of New Hampshire; and whether or not he believed in
Communism. He was declared in contempt of court and briefly imprisoned. His
case was appealed and worked its way through the state and federal courts to
the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in Sweezy’s favor in Sweezy vs. New
Hampshire on June 17, 1957. The court found there was no legal evidence
that the New Hampshire legislators actually wanted the Attorney General to
obtain answers to these questions; and that the violation of Sweezy’s
constitutional liberties could not be justified on the basis of political
activities only “remotely connected to actual subversion.” The
written opinions of Chief Justice Warren and Justice Frankfurter in this case
have been regarded as among the most important judicial statements on academic
freedom. Sweezy, in a statement that he presented to the New Hampshire Attorney
General and that was included in the documents presented to the U.S. Supreme
Court, left no doubt about his views:
If the very first principle of the American constitutional form of
government is political freedom—which I take to include freedoms of
speech, press, assembly, and association—then I do not see how it can be
denied that these investigations are a grave danger to all that Americans have
always claimed to cherish. No rights are genuine if a person, for exercising
them, can be hauled up before some tribunal and forced under penalties of
perjury and contempt to account for his ideas and conduct.12
The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Sweezy vs. New Hampshire is
remembered historically as having delivered the death knell to the witch hunt
on U.S. campuses.
The repressive climate of the McCarthy era led directly to the emergence of
Monthly Review Press—the book publishing arm of Monthly
Review—in 1952. The idea of starting Monthly Review Press had its
origin in an accidental meeting in Central Park in 1951 between noted
journalist I. F. Stone and Huberman and Sweezy. Stone told them he had written
a book disputing the official history of the Korean War but had not been able
to find a publisher in a climate of fervent McCarthyism and war hysteria. They
asked to see the manuscript and on its strength started Monthly Review Press.
Stone’s Hidden History of the Korean War, the first book published
by the press, was released in May 1952.
Most of the early books published by the press, other than books by the
editors themselves, were in the same mold as Stone’s: books that were
viable in publishing terms, by well-known or highly accomplished authors who
had sought publishers elsewhere and failed because of ideological barriers
within publishing. Such titles included Harvey O’Connor’s The
Empire of Oil (1955), Paul Baran’s The Political Economy of Growth
(1957), William Appelman William’s The United States, Cuba and
Castro (1963), and William Hinton’s Fanshen (1966).
Hinton’s Fanshen was based on notes that the government had
confiscated and that he had spent years in the courts fighting to get back. He
finished the book in 1964 but spent three years unsuccessfully looking for a
trade publisher in Boston and New York. After Monthly Review Press published it
the cloth edition sold out almost immediately. Paperback rights were contracted
to Vintage, and the book sold another 200,000 paperback copies.
Despite the adverse political environment, Sweezy continued to write and
cowrite articles on all aspects of the critique of capitalism and Marxian
theory, adding up to well over a hundred major articles and reviews in MR
alone by the early 1990s. Visiting Cuba shortly after the 1959 revolution,
Huberman and Sweezy got to know Fidel Castro and Che Guevara with whom they
toured the island. Huberman and Sweezy were the first to recognize that Cuba
would necessarily evolve in a socialist direction—if the revolution were
to survive at all. A special issue of Monthly Review in which the
editors wrote on the transformation of the Cuban economy, entitled Cuba: The
Anatomy of a Revolution, appeared in July–August 1960 and quickly sold
out. (It was later released in book form.) The two editors followed this first
book with Socialism in Cuba (1969). In the midst of all of this,
involving lengthy trips away from home, Sweezy and his second wife, Nancy,
divorced in 1960. The following year he married Zirel Druskin Dowd.
MR Press’s publication of Paul Baran’s The Political Economy of
Growth in 1957 marked the beginning of Marxian dependency theory and helped
to establish Monthly Review’s primary identity as a backer of third
world revolutions. Baran had been born in 1910 into a Jewish family in Nikolaev
on the Black Sea. His father was a medical doctor with close ties to the
Menshevik branch of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. Baran received
his formal education in Germany and Russia, studying at the Plekhanov Institute
of Economics at the University of Moscow and then taking a research position at
the Agricultural Academy of Berlin, followed by a research assistantship at the
famous Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. He completed his Ph.D. under
Emil Lederer a distinguished socialist economist who was later to found the
famous “university in exile,” a refuge for antifascists at New
York’s New School for Social Research. Baran also got to know Rudolf
Hilferding, the most renowned economic theorist in the German and Austrian
social democratic movements, and wrote for a time for Hilferding’s journal
Die Gesellschaft. After Hitler’s rise to power Baran left Germany
and eventually made his way to the United States via Russia and England. In the
United States he met Paul Sweezy and was a graduate student in economics at
Harvard. During the war he worked in the OSS and then in the United
States’ Strategic Bombing Survey under John Kenneth Galbraith. After the
war he took a job at the Federal Reserve Bank and then as a professor at
Stanford. In the early 1950s Baran, along with Michal Kalecki and Oskar Lange,
informally advised Monthly Review’s editors. Baran wrote for
MR in those years under the pseudonym of Historicus.13
Baran’s major, single-authored book, The Political Economy of
Growth, had two parts. The first was devoted to accounting for the system
of accumulation under monopoly capitalism in the rich countries in the
mid-twentieth century. The second investigated the political economy of
underdevelopment, accounting for the role of imperialism in the misuse and
siphoning off of the economic surplus (the net proceeds of society after
consumption and other essential costs are accounted for) generated by the
underdeveloped countries. The problem, as Andre Gunder Frank was later famously
to put it in his Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America
(Monthly Review Press, 1967), was “the development of
underdevelopment.” It was this second part of Baran’s study,
providing for the first time a rigorous Marxian analysis of conditions of third
world dependency, which was to become the most acclaimed part of the book,
contributing to its lasting influence.
However, even before The Political Economy of Growth was published,
Baran and Sweezy began collaborating on a more systematic treatment of the
issues raised in the first part of Baran’s book. It was this new work that
they referred to for years in their correspondence as their “opus.”
The result, after ten years, was the publication in 1966 of Monopoly
Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order. (Baran’s
death of a heart attack preceded the publication of the book by two years, but
Sweezy explained in the preface that the book had been finished in all of its
essentials prior to Baran’s death.)
Written in an easily accessible style, Monopoly Capital was
nonetheless a sophisticated synthesis that grew out of Sweezy’s Theory
of Capitalist Development as well as Baran’s Political Economy of
Growth, and was directly inspired by Josef Steindl’s classic
Maturity and Stagnation in American Capitalism (1952), which had been
built on foundations provided by Kalecki. It also reflected the insights of
Marx, Veblen, Keynes, and Schumpeter.
At the core of Monopoly Capital was the thesis that Marx’s
fundamental “law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall,”
associated with accumulation in the era of free competition, had been replaced,
in the more restrictive competitive environment of monopoly capitalism (in
which a handful of giant firms tended to control key industries and the economy
as a whole), by a law of the tendency of the surplus to rise. The nature of the
price mechanism under monopoly capitalism (an argument that went back to
Sweezy’s earlier theory of the kinked demand curve) meant that capital
tended not to adjust to shortfalls in final demand by lowering prices, but
generated instead chronic excess capacity, as plants were idled to protect
profit margins.
As one analyst has cogently summarized the basic contradiction spelled out
by Baran and Sweezy, in the technical language of professional economics:
The potential surplus (which includes profit, interest, rent,
surplus employee compensation, government spending and other wasteful
expenditures) rises as productivity growth allows production costs to fall
relative to prices. This potential fails to be fully realized, however, since
investment spending stagnates when excess productive capacity is not eliminated
by margin-squeezing price competition. Thus the existence of monopolistic
conditions and so downwardly rigid mark-ups lead to inadequacy of effective
demand by weakening the inducement to invest while maintaining the profit share
and so restricting the growth of consumption.14
In this monopolistic pattern of accumulation, the critical problem became
not so much one of surplus generation as surplus absorption. Wage earners had
little or no access to surplus. The surplus was the gain to capital, derived
from property income. But capital was not able to absorb the entire vast
surplus at its disposal, as productivity expanded. Capitalist consumption
accounted for a decreasing share of capitalist demand as income grew.
Investment was hindered in absorbing the growing surplus by the fact that it
took the form of new productive capacity which could not be expanded
indefinitely independent of final, wage-based demand. “The tragedy of
investment,” as Kalecki had put it, “is that it is useful.” To
be sure there was always the possibility, Baran and Sweezy argued, of a new
“epoch-making innovation,” such as the steam engine, the railroad,
and the automobile, capable of transforming the entire economic landscape and
emerging as a major source of surplus absorbtion. But such Schumpeterian
innovations that define and accelerate the pace of economic activity, they
noted, were few and far between. Finally, foreign investment, instead of being
an easy outlet for domestically produced surplus, tended to generate a return
flow of surplus from the third world that was greater than what the advanced
capitalist world had invested there. The result was a powerful tendency toward
stagnation rooted in the failure to absorb all of the economic surplus actually
and potentially generated.
What was most distinctive about Monopoly Capital, however, was not
this argument in itself, which they had presented to a considerable extent in
their earlier works (and which was also present in the work of Kalecki and
Steindl). Rather the uniqueness of their argument was to be found in their
attempt to answer the more immediate historical question: Why if there is such
a powerful tendency toward stagnation under capitalism (particularly in its
monopoly stage) was the system expanding so rapidly? Monopoly Capital
was written during the great postwar expansion of the U.S. (and the world
capitalist) economy—the period that has so often in later decades been
characterized (somewhat misleadingly) as the “golden age.” Baran and
Sweezy were intent on explaining the reasons why the postwar expansion could be
seen as “exceptional,” due to special factors that did not contradict
their fundamental thesis that stagnation was the “normal” state of
monopoly capitalism. Some part of the post-Second World War economic expansion,
they argued, could be explained in terms of the favorable conditions following
the war: the built-up consumer liquidity and the new role of the United States
as the hegemonic force in the world economy, which served to increase demand
for U.S. goods. The expansion was also helped along by the second wave of the
automobilization of the economy, which had to be seen in terms of the stimulus
that this offered to the glass, steel, and rubber industries, and the enormous
increase in the construction of highways together with the emergence of suburbs
with all their attendant effects on the retail sphere. Here a truly
epoch-making innovation had played a part. But the additional stimulus from
these factors soon began to wane.
The result was that the U.S. economy became dependent on various forms of
economic waste in order to maintain its momentum. Here Baran and Sweezy
highlighted three forms of waste: the expansion of the sales effort
(encompassing the entire marketing system as well as, following Veblen,
“the penetration of the sales effort into the production process”);
military spending (not only Cold War spending but the effects of two regional
wars in Asia); and growth of the financial sphere. Subsequently, Sweezy
criticized Monopoly Capital for not having placed enough emphasis on the
growth of the financial sector. But the fact that a section in the book was
devoted to this constituted a remarkable insight at the time.)
Once the expansion of the sales effort, military spending, and the
ballooning of finance were added to the stimuli provided by consumer liquidity
and a second wave of automobilization after the war, the remarkable nature of
the post-Second World War boom stood out. As Baran and Sweezy wrote, “it
is probably safe to say that never since the height of the railroad epoch has
the American economy been subject in peacetime to such powerful stimuli. What
is really remarkable is that despite the strength and persistence of these
stimuli, the familiar symptoms of inadequate surplus
absorption—unemployment and underutilization of capacity—began to
appear at an early stage and, apart from cyclical fluctuations, have been
growing more severe.” Nor was there any easy answer to this for monopoly
capitalist society, since the most effective means of stimulating
demand—price-cutting and expansion of civilian government
spending—were ruled out by the vested interests that ruled the society.
Monopoly Capital was greeted with rave reviews in places as varied as
the American Economic Review, the New York Review of Books, the
Nation, and Science & Society. For the New Left that emerged
at this time it became one of the fundamental texts. As one activist from those
days recalled, Monopoly Capital “was one of those books
‘everyone’ [in the student movement] read or discussed in a study
group or recommended to radical friends.”15 Monopoly Capital also represented the original
theoretical ground of most of the younger radical economists in the United
States who formed the Union for Radical Political Economics in 1968. Neither
entirely Old Left nor New Left Monthly Review was often a meeting place
of ideas, carrying forward a historical tradition of critique in a way that
both old and new radical activists could understand. Nina Serrano a student
activist in Madison, Wisconsin in the late 1950s and ’60s later recalled
that after Paul Sweezy gave a talk on the University of Wisconsin campus:
“Most of us left his reception as subscribers to Monthly Review.
For the next few years, articles from that magazine were often the center of
lively discussion.”16
In 1971 Sweezy delivered the Marshall Lecture at Cambridge University.
Entitled “On the Theory of Monopoly Capitalism” (later reprinted in
Modern Capitalism and Other Essays, 1972) it constituted perhaps his
most explicit discussion of the deeper issues associated with economic waste
and its consequences and the role that this played in the original Monopoly
Capital argument. In 1974–76 he served on the executive board of the
American Economic Association. His reputation in this period among the younger
leftwing political economists was nothing short of formidable, an almost
legendary figure. Richard Wolff, an economics professor at the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst, was quoted by the Los Angeles Times as
saying in 1977: “He is without question the leading American
radical economist. No one holds a candle to him. Even the straight (orthodox)
economists agree.”17
Two Op-Ed page articles in the New York Times aimed at the burgeoning
New Left economics, were written separately in 1973 by Kenneth Arrow and Paul
Samuelson, both Nobel Prize winners in economics. Arrow and Samuelson directed
their barbs in particular at Paul Sweezy (who later replied in an essay
entitled “Capitalism for Worse” in Leonard Silk, ed., Capitalism:
The Moving Target). Arrow especially displayed skepticism regarding Baran
and Sweezy’s argument that military spending was the main fiscal means of
maintaining effective demand in the U.S. economy and that expansion of civilian
government spending as a share of total federal spending on goods and services
was largely blocked by the capitalist class. For Arrow there was no reason to
believe that civilian government spending would not displace military spending
as a fiscal stimulus sometime in the near future. More than three decades
later, however, history seems only to have added further credence to Baran and
Sweezy’s argument. Heavy reliance on military spending still characterizes
U.S. capitalism in the opening years of the twenty-first century, even though
the Cold War is long gone. Meanwhile the powers that be are demanding deeper
and deeper cuts into social welfare spending to the point that even Social
Security, once considered politically sacrosanct, is now targeted for
privatization.
From 1954 on, Huberman and Sweezy wrote one trenchant critique after another
in Monthly Review on the Vietnam War. These articles were collected
together in 1970 in Vietnam: The Endless War, 1954-1970—a book that
as much as any other reflected their powerful critique of U.S. capitalism.
Huberman died suddenly of a heart attack in 1968. Sweezy cowrote the last few
essays of the book with Harry Magdoff, who was to join him as coeditor of
Monthly Review after Huberman’s death, and who, even more than
Huberman and Sweezy themselves, devoted himself to the systematic critique of
imperialism.
Magdoff was born in 1913 in the Bronx into a left-wing family and was
well-versed in Marx even before he began studies at the City College of New
York, where he initially focused on mathematics and physics. While at City
College he joined a radical group called “The Social Problem Club”
and edited the group’s monthly magazine, Frontiers. Later he joined
the National Students League and the Youth League Against War and Fascism. He
became editor of the National Student League’s Student Review in
1932–33. After he was expelled from City College for his political
activities he went to New York University’s School of Commerce, where he
received his B.S. in economics in 1936. Upon graduation he took a job with the
National Commission on Technological Unemployment and Reemployment of the Works
Progress Administration. While working for this project he developed the method
for measuring productivity in individual manufacturing industries still used by
the Department of Labor. Subsequently, Magdoff worked for the National Defense
Advisory Board and the War Production Board. In the latter capacity he
inspected and was involved in the planning and control of factories producing
machinery and equipment for metalworking factories. Near the end of the war, in
1944, Magdoff was named director of the Current Business Analysis Division of
the Department of Commerce and was responsible for overseeing the publication
of the Survey of Current Business. Beginning in 1946 Magdoff served as
special assistant to Henry Wallace, then the secretary of commerce. In mid-1947
he took a job with the New Council of American Business, a pro-New Deal
business group. When Henry Wallace ran for president in 1948 Magdoff wrote
Wallace’s small business platform.
The rise of McCarthyism, however, ended Magdoff’s career in Washington.
He was called before various Congressional investigative committees and grand
juries questioning his political background and found himself blacklisted. For
most of a decade, out of economic necessity, he worked on Wall Street as a
financial analyst and a stockbroker, finally taking a job selling insurance. In
the late 1950s Magdoff joined Russell and Russell, a publisher of out-of-print
scholarly books. He eventually bought an interest in the company. He remained
at Russell and Russell until 1965, when Athenum bought the firm.
Magdoff attained a modicum of financial independence through the sale of his
interest in Russell and Russell and was at last free to pursue his intellectual
and political interests. In March 1965 he wrote his first article for
Monthly Review, “The Achievement of Paul Baran,” following
Baran’s death. After a few years occupied partly by teaching as an adjunct
professor at the New School for Social Research, he joined Sweezy in 1969 at
MR. During these years Magdoff wrote a series of pathbreaking articles on U.S.
imperialism, which became The Age of Imperialism (1969), a work that
complemented Monopoly Capital. His subsequent book, Imperialism: From
the Colonial Age to the Present (1978), which consisted mainly of essays
from Monthly Review, led off with a long article that he had written for
the Encyclopedia Britannica.
At the same time Magdoff and Sweezy began writing a continuing series in
MR on the U.S. economy, which combined the theoretical analysis that
Sweezy had helped to develop, and in which Magdoff was equally well-versed,
with Magdoff’s in-depth knowledge of U.S. government statistics. These
articles offered an empirical basis for a critical appraisal of the U.S.
economy, rarely seen in radical publications, and seldom equaled elsewhere.
Already in the 1965 Socialist Register Magdoff had drawn attention to
the crucial role of financial expansion as a countervailing factor with respect
to stagnation. Now Magdoff and Sweezy systematically analyzed the relation of
stagnation and finance, and a whole host of other economic problems in a
running commentary that was to be gathered into five books: The Dynamics of
U.S. Capitalism (1970), The End of Prosperity (1977), The
Deepening Crisis of U.S. Capitalism (1980), Stagnation and the Financial
Explosion (1987), and The Irreversible Crisis (1988).
1 OF 2 | NEXT >> |
1 | 2 |
Notes
- “The Unorthodox Ideas of Radical Economists Win a Wider Hearing,”
Wall Street Journal, February 11, 1972; John Kenneth Galbraith,
Economics in Perspective (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 189.
- Sweezy, Interview November 1986–February 1987, Columbia University
Oral History Project.
- A. P. Lerner and Paul M. Sweezy, “British Foreign Policy,” New
Statesman and Nation, September 5, 1936; John Maynard Keynes, Collected
Writings, vol. 28 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982),
56–57.
- Paul Samuelson, “Memories,” Newsweek, June 2, 1969.
- John Kenneth Galbraith and Shigeto Tsuru, tributes to Paul Sweezy,
Monthly Review, April 2000.
- Scitovsky to Sweezy, January 25, 1994.
- Schumpeter’s letter quoted in Richard Swedberg, Joseph A.
Schumpeter: His Life and Work (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 140, 272.
- Lifschultz, “Could Karl Marx Teach Economics in America?”
- Business Week, April 13, 1963.
- Notes from the Editors, Monthly Review, February 1960.
- Quoted in Larry Lifschultz, “Could Karl Marx Teach Economics in
America?” Ramparts, April 1974.
- U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. Reports, vol. 354, October Term, 1956.
- Another key figure advising the MR editors on economics in this
period was the economist Oskar Lange, whom Sweezy had known at Harvard.
- Tracy Mott, “Monopoly Capitalism,” in Philip Arestis and Malcolm
Sawyer, eds., The Elgar Companion to Radical Political Economy
(Brookfield, Vermont, 1994).
- Joanne Barkan, “A Blast from the Past,” Dissent, Spring
1997.
- Nina Serrano, “A Madison Bohemian,” in Paul Buhle, ed. History
and the New Left: Madison, Wisconsin, 1950–1970 (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1990), 75.
- Richard Wolff quoted in “Leading Prophet of Economic Collapse Cheers
Up,” Los Angeles Times, August 21, 1977.
- Sweezy, “Marxian Value Theory and Crisis,” Monthly Review,
July–August 1979; reprinted in Ian Steedman, et. al., The Value
Controversy (London: Verso, 1981).
- Pesi Masani to Sweezy, August 31, 1982; Sweezy to Pesi Masani, September
29, 1982.
- Ecologically, Sweezy agreed with the main thrust of Nicholas
Georgescu-Roegen’s critique of economics and his emphasis on entropy,
particularly as set out in his Energy and Economic Myths (1976).
- Letter to Paul M. Sweezy, author’s name obscure, no date;
Sweezy’s reply to unknown author December 25, 1979.
1 OF 2 | NEXT >> |
1 | 2 |
|
