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Notes From
the Editors
Farewell, Comrade
Paul
by Harry Magdoff
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
Also of Interest:
 Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and
Nature
by John Bellamy
Foster
|
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A major development in the monopoly capital argument that was to influence
Sweezy emanated from the work of Harry Braverman. Braverman became the director
of Monthly Review Press in 1967 after the press grew beyond what Huberman and
Sweezy could handle on their own. Born and raised in Brooklyn, Braverman had
worked for many years as a coppersmith and metalworker in the shipbuilding and
steel industries, where he had also been a trade unionist and socialist
activist in the Trotskyist tradition. In 1953 Braverman and a group led by Bert
Cochran left the Socialist Worker’s Party and the two published The
American Socialist, until it ceased publication in 1960. In 1958 The
American Socialist and Monthly Review published a joint issue on
U.S. labor. With the demise of The American Socialist Braverman had gone
to work for Grove Press, where he eventually rose from editor to vice-president
and general manager. He left Grove Press to take up the job as director of
Monthly Review Press.
In his new capacity, Braverman sought to put the press on a more solid basis
as the “university press of the left.” In this period Monthly Review
Press published many of its most important works, including translations from
other languages: Andre Gunder Frank’s Capitalism and Underdevelopment
in Latin America (1967), Che Guevara’s Reminiscences of the Cuban
Revolutionary War (1968), Ernest Mandel’s Marxist Economic Theory
(1970), Louis Althusser’s Lenin and Philosophy (1971),
Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (1972);
Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America (1973); Samir
Amin’s Accumulation on a World Scale (1974), Rayna Reiter, ed.,
Toward an Anthropology of Women (1975) and Charles Bettelheim’s
Class Struggles in the USSR (1976).
But the press’s best seller was Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly
Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (1974). In
Monopoly Capital Baran and Sweezy had dealt almost entirely with the
absorption of the economic surplus, while neglecting that part of the Marxian
critique that went directly to the root of the problem: the generation of
economic surplus in the labor process itself. In Labor and Monopoly
Capital, published two years before his death in 1976, Braverman took on
the prevailing assumption that labor conditions in the capitalist world had
steadily improved, with rising skill levels. Building on Marx’s analysis
and carefully examining the role that Frederick Winslow Taylor’s
scientific management had played in reshaping modern work relations, Braverman
demonstrated that the labor process under capitalism continued to be dominated
by the degradation of work and struggles over job control between labor and
capital. Within sociology Braverman’s critique was a bombshell, leading to
a whole new area of studies on the labor process. In 1996 his book was
designated by Contemporary Sociology, the American Sociological
Association’s book review journal, as one of the ten most influential
books in U.S. sociology in the previous twenty-five years. For Sweezy, who
wrote the foreword to Braverman’s book, Labor and Monopoly Capital
was a revelation, a solid confirmation of the power of Marx’s
critique. Sweezy went so far as to point to one place in Monopoly
Capital, where, lacking Marx’s genius and Braverman’s intimate
knowledge of the labor process, he and Baran had gone too far in swallowing the
prevailing ideology on rising skill levels in society. Only Braverman’s
Labor and Monopoly Capital, he said, had allowed him to see his mistake.
During the course of the 1950s and ’60s, Sweezy and Monthly
Review had partly lost sight of labor struggles in the United States, but
Labor and Monopoly Capital served to reconnect Monthly Review and
Sweezy with these issues. Sweezy’s position on the working class
immediately following the publication of Monopoly Capital was presented
in a 1967 talk called “Marx and the Proletariat,” delivered at the
third annual Socialist Scholars Conference in New York. Here his argument was
that Marx had expected the industrial proletariat to become a revolutionary
force as a result of the transformative technology of modern industry, which
degraded and homogenized the work force. However, the failure of revolution to
take place in the industrial capitalist countries in the nineteenth century,
due more than anything else to the lack of a revolutionary situation in this
period, had created conditions, partly through the actions of trade unions,
that had reversed the process of homogenization (if not the actual degradation)
of work, creating “a vast proliferation of job categories” and status
differentials within labor’s ranks, submerging class consciousness.
Consequently, the proletariat in the advanced capitalist states had moved from
a revolutionary to a reformist orientation.
Yet, the industrial proletariat of advanced capitalism, Sweezy went on to
argue, was not the only possible revolutionary agent. The history of the
twentieth century had proven that the revolutionary impetus had been
transferred to the third world, the mass of the population of which had become
the focal point of world capitalist exploitation in a way similar to what Marx
had suggested for the industrial proletariat at the center of the capitalist
system in his day. Hence, the future of the revolt against capitalism and the
building of socialism were to be found primarily in the periphery of the
capitalist world.
This fit with the general orientation of Monopoly Capital, which was
dedicated to Che Guevara and which included a chapter devoted to the nature of
racial exploitation in the United States. It had pointed in its conclusion to
the possibility of an alliance between exploited peoples of color in the center
of the system and revolutionary forces emanating from the third world.
Imperialism and racism then became the weak points of capitalism and could be
countered only by a revolutionary break with the system.
Sweezy was a strong supporter of Salvador Allende’s democratically
elected socialist government in Chile, where he was invited as a guest of honor
at Allende’s inauguration. But he and Magdoff strongly cautioned
Allende’s Popular Unity government that without military power to back
them up, their state—as with any state in a surrounding capitalist
environment—would be vulnerable. The subsequent CIA-directed coup in Chile
suggested, in Sweezy’s view, that given the realities of U.S. imperialism,
revolution in the periphery could probably only occur through armed revolution.
(See Sweezy and Magdoff, ed., Revolution and Counter-Revolution in
Chile.) Monthly Review resolutely supported armed revolutions on all
three continents of the third world. As
C. Wright Mills had said of the Cuban revolution, the MR approach was
to worry not “about” these revolutions, so much as to worry
“with” them.
Still, although Sweezy was to continue to insist throughout all of his
subsequent work that the main prospect for revolution lay in the periphery, he
became more attuned to class struggle in the advanced capitalist world from the
1970s on, partly as a response to Braverman’s work and a whole host of
labor process studies that Monthly Review nurtured, and partly due to
the new signs of life in the working-class movement which, for a time,
accompanied the economic crisis conditions of the 1970s. By the late 1980s and
early 1990s Monthly Review was making new efforts to connect with and
address the needs of radical labor—even as radical labor activists
themselves became more concerned with globalization trends and the need to
create solidarity with third world workers.
All of these transformations in Sweezy’s analysis were evident in his
short book, Four Lectures on Marxism (1981), comprised of four lectures
delivered at Hosei University in Tokyo in October 1979 under the title of
“Marxism Today,” and two long appendixes added later. More than
simply a statement of the monopoly capital theory, the book amounted to a brief
sketch of his critique of the system together with his assessment of actually
existing socialism. In terms of the theory of accumulation it represented a
subtle shift away from the monopoly capital argument as such and toward the
larger historical issue of industrial maturity, related to stagnation, that
Sweezy had addressed in The Theory of Capitalist Development but that he
now tried to explain in more historical terms.
The argument was couched in terms of the two-department model of Marx’s
reproduction schemes, consisting of department 1 (or investment goods
industries) and department 2 (consumption goods industries). Accumulation under
capitalism prospered as long as department 1 could grow more rapidly than
department 2. But this created a tendency towards overaccumulation, since the
growth of department 1 was ultimately dependent on department 2—one could
not “build mills to build more mills forever” as J. B. Clark had
contended. The maturity argument, which was derived from Hansen, but was
presented by Sweezy in Marxian terms, suggested that rapid growth of department
1 was easiest at the initial stages of production, when all industry had to be
built up from scratch. But once basic industry had been developed new
investment was more likely to be impeded by investment that had occurred in the
past resulting in the growth of ample capacity able to satisfy not only current
demand but also further expansions in demand in most industries. Together with
the problem of monopolistic accumulation, this generated a strong tendency
toward stagnation.
This shift in emphasis in Sweezy’s argument—where larger
historical factors similar to those raised by Hansen gained more prominence,
and the problem of monopolistic accumulation was then seen as taking place in
that wider context of “maturity and stagnation”—became even more
pronounced in Sweezy and Magdoff’s writings in the 1980s. In the face of
the growth of supply-side economics, which went against the main theoretical
breakthrough of the Keynesian revolution (the critique of Say’s Law that
supply creates its own demand), Sweezy and Magdoff returned again and again to
the stagnation debate of the 1930s and the historical problem of investment in
capitalist societies. This was signaled in particular by Sweezy’s lecture
“Why Stagnation?” delivered to the Harvard Economics Club in March
1982, in which he rehearsed the Hansen-Schumpeter debate and its significance.
In this and other articles such as “Full Recovery or Stagnation?”
(from the title of Hansen’s book) and “Listen, Keynesians!”
Magdoff and Sweezy attempted to advance the analysis of stagnation in the
1980s, while reintroducing their readers to the economic insights of the past
(since supply-side economics was then flying in the face of these). As always
the issue came down to the thesis that stagnation was the “normal”
state of monopoly capitalism—so that the problem was less one of
explaining stagnation, than of accounting for periods of rapid growth. It was
the 1960s, not the 1970s and ’80s, Sweezy and Magdoff argued, that were
the exception to the rule of slow growth and underutilization of labor and
productive capacity. In 1987 Sweezy provided his most succinct summary of the
history of the analysis of monopoly capitalism in an essay on that topic in
The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics.
In 1979 Sweezy was drawn back into the debates over Marxian value theory due
to criticism generated by followers of Piero Sraffa at Cambridge University. In
response to Ian Steedman’s argument that Marx’s labor-value theory
was not wrong, but essentially “redundant” in relation to Sraffian
(or neo-Ricardian) analysis, Sweezy insisted—returning to his argument in
The Theory of Capitalist Development—that what mattered was not
just the quantitative value problem, which neo-Ricardian theory could provide
an answer to, but the qualitative value problem to which the quantitative
analysis was inseparably related in Marx’s analysis. The qualitative value
problem lay at the core of Marx’s key concept of the rate of surplus value
and the economic sociology that it entailed. The distinctions between the
British school of Marxian economics, which had been influenced by the work of
Maurice Dobb and had concentrated simply on the quantitative value problem, and
the American school of Marxist economics, which was based on Sweezy’s
Theory of Capitalist Development with its added emphasis on the
qualitative value problem thus stood out in bold relief.18
In addition to his work on capitalist development, Sweezy contributed over
the years to the analysis of the contradictory economic and social path of what
he was to call “post-revolutionary societies.” In On the
Transition to Socialism (1971, with Charles Bettelheim), Sweezy boldly
contended, against the theory and practice of market socialism then gaining
ground in Eastern Europe, that attempts to utilize the market mechanism as the
central means of building socialism were likely to lead to nothing less than
the restoration of capitalism. It was the bureaucratic-Stalinist political
system rather than central planning as such, Sweezy argued, that constituted
the real weakness of Soviet society—although the two could not easily be
separated and the failure to grant more political power to the workers would
eventually generate mounting economic problems as well. In December 1970 he
wrote in MR in his debate with Bettelheim:
What I wanted to emphasize was that when the bureaucratically
administered economy runs into difficulties (as it certainly must), there are
two politically opposite ways in which a solution can be sought. One is to
weaken the bureaucracy, politicize the masses, and entrust increasing
initiative and responsibility to the workers themselves. This is the road
forward for socialist relations of production. The other way is to retreat (as
was the case with the New Economic Policy under Lenin) but as an ostensible
step toward a more efficient “socialist” economy. This is in fact to
elevate profit-making to the guiding role in the economic process and to tell
the workers to mind their own business, which is to work hard so that they can
consume more. It is to recreate the conditions in which commodity fetishism
flourishes along with its associated false and alienated consciousness. It is,
I submit, the road back to class domination and ultimately the restoration of
capitalism.
A decade later in Post-Revolutionary Society (1980) he advanced the
thesis that, although the original socialist character of the October
Revolution was not open to question, a qualitative break had occurred during
the early Stalin era, leading to the emergence of a class-exploitative system
of a new kind—neither capitalism nor socialism. In the concluding
paragraph of that book (which preceded by five years the rise of Gorbachev),
Sweezy declared that the Soviet system had “entered a period of
stagnation, different from the stagnation of the advanced capitalist world but
showing no more visible signs of a way out.” Later, in a new preface to
the 1990 Japanese edition of Post-Revolutionary Society, he argued that
as a result of perestroika and “the revolution of 1989” in Eastern
Europe, it had become clear to the entire world that the new class system that
arose in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Stalin period has come to
“a dead end.” “The conclusion that emerges from this
analysis,” Sweezy went on to observe, “is that the crisis of the
Soviet Union and the collapse of its East European allies was not due to the
failure of socialism. The struggle for socialism in the Soviet Union as
recounted above, was lost long before with the consolidation of a class system,
and it was this system which, despite its undoubted achievements, ultimately
failed.”
Sweezy’s writings on China displayed the same critical sense. The
Chinese Revolution, he believed (and as Mao had emphasized) was at all times in
jeopardy because of the possibility of a new class emerging that would
ultimately destroy the prospects of the revolution and lead to a restoration of
capitalism. Sweezy and MR thus sympathized very broadly with Mao’s
call for a “Cultural Revolution” and the motive that had inspired it,
aimed at stopping the emergence of such a new class—without supporting all
of what was to develop in Mao’s failed attempt to reinvigorate the
revolutionary process in China.
In all of this he remained resolutely committed to a socialist future. Asked
in 1999 whether the world was “closer to socialism now than it seemed when
you started Monthly Review, or farther?” Sweezy answered:
“Well, if socialism is ever going to happen, we’re nearer to it now
than we were then.”
Sweezy has long been regarded as one of the leading figures of Western
Marxism in the twentieth century. “The most original American contribution
to Marxist theory,” David McLellan wrote in his Marxism After Marx
(1989), “has been in political economy.” Here he singled out in
particular the works of Baran and Sweezy and Braverman. But Sweezy’s
contribution to Marxism is in many ways as sociological and historical as it is
economic. Indeed, it is in sociology that Sweezy is often held in the highest
regard today, where he is seen as playing as a fundamental role in many areas,
including the important debate over ruling class or power elite that emerged in
response to C. Wright Mills now-classic work, The Power Elite (1956).
Sweezy had been the most forceful thinker in his time in putting forward the
notion of the “ruling class” as the principal force in U.S.
society—a ruling class that had its basis in ownership of property income,
or surplus value. He had responded to a question on the nature of the ruling
class from a sociology graduate student by writing a two-part article entitled
“The American Ruling Class” in the May and June 1951 issues of
Monthly Review.
When C. Wright Mills in The Power Elite seemed to address
hierarchical power in U.S. society while abandoning the notion of a ruling
class, Sweezy provided an influential reply: “Power Elite or Ruling
Class?,” followed more than a decade later by “Thoughts on the
American System”—both of which appeared in his book Modern
Capitalism and Other Essays. In response to Mills’s objection that
“ruling class” was “a badly loaded term” because it
involved the proposition that an “economic class rules politically”
Sweezy responded: “What of it? The question is whether the theory is
applicable to the United States today, and if the investigation shows that it
is, then the only ‘loading’ is on the side of truth. As I have
argued...most of Mills’ factual material supports the ruling class theory
to the hilt.” For Sweezy, Mills’s attempt to explain things in terms
of a threefold power elite consisting of the political elite, the corporate
elite, and the military elite had serious shortcomings, since it could easily
be shown that these were not three separate institutions each with their
clearly defined sphere, but represented overlapping realms in which the
corporate rich were clearly the ruling force. Not only did politicians feed at
the corporate capitalist trough, but also military leaders were subordinated to
the needs of the capitalist class. As Sweezy pointed out in “Thoughts on
the American System,” at the time of Nixon’s presidency, “since
the Truman administration, this post [secretary of defense] has normally been
in the charge of a top executive of one of the country’s biggest
corporations: General Motors, Proctor and Gamble, Morgan Guaranty Trust, and
Ford.”
Sweezy’s lucid analysis of the U.S. state and the role of the ruling
capitalist class was made evident again and again at the most concrete level in
his analyses of U.S. militarism and imperialism and state efforts to organize
class exploitation and cope with economic crisis. Like Marx, Veblen, and
Schumpeter before him, Sweezy constantly crossed the boundaries between
economics and sociology, creating a system of thought that belonged to both
worlds—necessarily so since he denied the value of such artificial
academic boundaries. Although originally an economist he constantly expanded
the domain of his analysis. For example, in July-August 1985 Monthly Review
ran a very influential special issue, introduced by Magdoff and Sweezy and
organized with the help of Cornel West, on “Religion and the Left.”
In his Four Lectures on Marxism Sweezy had started out discussing the
question of the dialectic and the distinction between materialism and idealism
in Marxist thought—entering into the epistemological (and ontological)
realm. Shortly after the book was published he received a letter from his
friend Professor Pesi Masani of the Department of Mathematics and Physics at
the University of Pittsburgh, which, though enthusiastic about the book, chided
Sweezy on his use of the term “materialism” for what would nowadays
be called “realism.” As Masani put it,
If I ask what my red ball point pen is, I run into several answers.
It is an aggregate of chemical molecules, it is an electromagnetic field, it is
a spatio-termporal region (a class of events) with a particular curvature
tensor. Each answer has to be thought of as a particular coding of the pen. The
pen itself is what is common to all these codings—what Russell calls
relation-structure, and what nowadays is described as a group-invariant. This
is [a] highly mathematical and therefore ideal concept. So if we really want to
ontologize, we would all have to be called “idealist” or
“realist-idealist.”
Sweezy replied:
If I understand you there are no serious disagreements between us
on an epistemological level. The question of what your red ball point pen is
may be infinitely complicated, but what it is not is relatively simple: it
is not an idea originating in someone’s head. In fact it existed,
at least in potentia, long before there were any heads. As I read Marx
and Engels, this defines the dividing line between materialism and idealism. If
you prefer the term “realism” to “materialism,” I have no
objection except that it may tend to obscure the interpretation of the Marxist
position.19
One area that had long been of concern to Sweezy was the environment. For a
thinker who deplored in a Veblenian vein the vast amount of waste associated
with monopoly capitalism this was in fact a natural development. In their
popular Introduction to Socialism (1968) Huberman and Sweezy had
emphasized the need for conservation of natural resources. Monopoly Capital
had argued that production should be for use not for exchange (or profit)
and that enormous sales efforts engendering unnecessary expenditures should be
curtailed—a point that Baran and Sweezy also made in their important
article “Theses on Advertising,” published in the Winter 1964 issue
of Science & Society. In “Cars and Cities,” which appeared
in Monthly Review in April 1972 Sweezy presented a far-ranging critique
of the automobilization of U.S. society—looking at the effects with
respect to urban sprawl and the generation of a “Gasopolis.” Writing
in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in November of that year he
pointed out that the alleged “‘benefits’ of automobilization on
the U.S. scale include such things as urban decay and breakdown, growing and
perhaps irreversible destruction of land and pollution of air.” In 1989,
with growing world concern about global warming and other global scale
environmental problems, Sweezy wrote two pathbreaking essays: “Capitalism
and the Environment” (cowritten with Magdoff) and “Socialism and
Ecology.” Building on the work of Barry Commoner and refusing to turn away
from the logic of his own analysis, Sweezy argued, in a way that was radical
even by the standards of ecological economists, that “essential for
success” in the environmental domain was “a reversal, not a mere
slowing down of the [growth] trends of the last few centuries.” But this
was something that the capitalist accumulation process itself would not allow.
Subsequently, Monthly Review increasingly addressed the environmental
crisis. On several occasions, in the Notes from the Editors, Sweezy analyzed
the annual State of World reports of the World Watch Institute,
examining the implications for capitalism and the environment. His last book
review, entitled “The Guilt of Capitalism” (MR, June 1997)
reviewing Who Owns the Sun? by Daniel M. Berman and John T.
O’Connor, recounted how the vested interests of the system in the United
States had blocked the development of solar power. For Sweezy there was no
contradiction between classical Marxism and concern for the environment—as
Marx himself had demonstrated his sensitivity to the ecological contradictions
of capitalism.20
Sweezy’s final economic statements were among his more important,
reflecting as ever his emphasis on the historical changes in the system. In
June 1994 he wrote a piece called “The Triumph of Financial Capital”
that described the evolution of monopoly capital into a system in which
financial capital was ascendant, shifting “the locus of economic and
political power.” Even those in the boardrooms of the dominant
multinational corporations were now constrained by the global network of
financial markets (in which they of course were direct participants).
Nation-states, even the United States itself, he argued were to a considerable
extent subject to the exigencies of these markets. Economically, this situation
had grown out of prolonged stagnation. In a reversal of earlier trends
financial explosions now occurred during and as a result of stagnation, rather
than feeding mainly on expansions of production. This carried far-reaching
ramifications for the future of the capitalist economy and Sweezy posed this as
the primary unsolved problem for those trying to understand much less oppose
the capitalist system. In September 1997 he wrote his final article: “More
(Or Less) On Globalization.” In that article Sweezy entered the
globalization debate. “Globalization,” he argued, “is not a
condition or a phenomenon: it is a process that has been going on for a long
time, in fact ever since capitalism came into the world as a viable form of
society four or five centuries ago.” Globalization should not be viewed as
“the driving force of capitalism,” since that lay in the internal
motor force of the system: capital accumulation itself.
Sweezy’s last major article on imperialism (cowritten with Magdoff) was
written as a response to the 1991 Gulf War on Iraq. Entitled “Pox
Americana,” it provided a brief history of U.S. interventions in the third
world and ended grimly:
The United States, it seems, has locked itself into a course with
the gravest implications for the whole world. Change is the only certain law of
the universe. It cannot be stopped. If societies are prevented from trying to
solve their problems in their own ways, they will certainly not solve them in
ways dictated by others. And if they cannot move forward, they will inevitably
move backward. This is what is happening in a large part of the world today,
and the United States, the most powerful nation with unlimited means of
coercion at its disposal, seems to be telling the others that this is a fate
that must be accepted on pain of violent destruction.
Alfred North Whitehead, one of the greatest thinkers of this past
century, once said: “I have never ceased to entertain the idea that the
human race might rise to a certain point and then decline and never retrieve
itself. Plenty of other forms of life have done that. Evolution may go down as
well as up.” It is an unsettling but by no means far-fetched thought that
the form and active agency of this decline may be taking shape before our very
eyes in these closing years of the twentieth century A.D.
This is of course not to suggest that irreversible decline is
inevitable. In human affairs nothing is inevitable until it happens. But it is
to suggest that the way things have been going for the last half century, and
especially for the past year, holds that potential. And it is also to recognize
that we, the American people, have a special responsibility to do something
about it since it is our government that is threatening to play Samson in the
temple of humanity.
As with many great thinkers and writers, a large part of the power of
Sweezy’s thought had to do with the lucidity of his prose; his marvelous
capacity for clarity in areas where so many others offer merely obscurity,
jargon, fashionable claims, and a seeming inability to separate the essential
from the trivial. As with Marx, Veblen, Schumpeter, and Galbraith the style
with which he conveyed his ideas was often almost as important to their
reception as the ideas themselves. The brilliance of his prose occasioned
numerous comments and inquiries. In 1979 one admirer wrote “the thing that
captivates me apart from your enrichment of Marxism is your prose style. This
has so appealed to me that I have finally yielded to the temptation of not so
much asking you of the secret of it; but who is your favorite prose writer. I
am assuming, I hope not undialectically, that you were not born with the art,
and perhaps consciously developed it from a creative imitation of a favorite
prose writer.” Sweezy replied on December 25, 1979:
My prose style, such as it is, was largely formed in years apart at
both school and college in writing for and editing the school and college
newspapers, which I did at the expense of my studies and originally with the
intention of adopting a journalistic career. Eventually I shifted to economics,
but with the benefit of having taught myself to write simply and clearly, at
least by the standards of the economics profession. As to my favorite authors:
Marx of course is by far the first, a beautiful stylist as well as an
incomparable intellect. I could name many others, I suppose, though I am not
sure how I would rank them, but that would not be of much use to you. So I will
just mention three: Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and Edgar Snow (a fine
example of top-notch journalism). You mention Orwell, and while I haven’t
read anything by him in a long time, my recollection is of a very fine writer
too. One more: Trotsky, whose History of the Russian Revolution
(translated into English, I believe, by Max Eastman) played an important
role in converting a very bourgeois American first-year graduate student into a
Marxist (my admiration for Trotsky as a writer never led me to become a
political Trotskyist).21
In his later years Sweezy taught occasionally as a visiting professor at
Cornell, Stanford, the New School for Social Research, Yale, and Manchester
University. In 1983 he was granted an honorary doctorate of literature from
Jawaharlal Nehru University in India, and in 1999 he received the
Veblen-Commons Award from the Association for Evolutionary Economics. But he
remained for the most part removed from the academic world after his departure
from Harvard. As an intellectual and a Marxist Sweezy rose at a young age to
the pinnacle of the academic profession and then felt compelled at a crucial
point in his life—if he was to remain true to his socialist
beliefs—to abandon a university career. As he always insisted, he was
fortunate to have access to the surplus value that would allow him to chart an
independent course. The result was the creation of a new institution of the
left, Monthly Review, in which he was free to develop his critique of
capitalism in a way that academics seldom are, and at the same time to nurture,
not only those trying to navigate their way from the Old Left to the New, but
also generations of younger radicals. His correspondence was voluminous, since
he wrote not just in his role as an editor, but also as an educator, assisting
anyone who sought to penetrate to the roots of capitalist society. His role in
this respect was inseparable from the larger purposes of Monthly Review
as an institution devoted to left education. As Russell Jacoby wrote in his
best-selling book, The Last Intellectuals (1987):
Although often ignored, the writings by the associates of Monthly Review
and, specifically, the books by Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy, Harry Braverman,
and Harry Magdoff formed a school that in coherency, originality, and boldness
no other American Marxism has come close to matching. When Marxists of other
countries turn to American contributors, it is primarily to these
authors....The force of these works [by Baran, Sweezy, Braverman and Magdoff]
cannot be attributed simply to the lives of the authors; but neither can it be
cleanly separated from them. The Monthly Review authors stood largely
outside the universities and they wrote for the educated reader. Their books
are not rehashings of Marxist dogma; nor are they monographs for colleagues.
“The desire to tell the truth,” wrote Baran, is “only one
condition for being an intellectual. The other is courage, readiness to
carry on rational inquiry to wherever it may lead...to withstand...comfortable
and lucrative conformity.”
Paul Sweezy died in Larchmont, New York on February 27, 2004. Not the least
of his legacies is the model of intellectual independence that he has left
behind. He demonstrated what Baran called the courage as well as the commitment
of an intellectual. And through the creation of Monthly Review he made
it possible for many others to share in the same commitment and courage. He
forever changed us. His life is a marker to us all.
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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.
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