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September
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October
2004, Volume 56 — Number 5
Paul M. Sweezy:
A Collective Portrait
c o n t
e n t s
» 
For more than a decade now the major
corporate media and the U.S. government have been celebrating the growing
"democratization" of Latin America. Rather than reflecting a genuine
concern with democracy, however, this was meant to symbolize the defeat of
various revolutionary movements, particularly in Central America in the 1980s
and early '90s. To the extent that formal, limited democracy actually made
gains in the region this was viewed by the ruling powers in the United States
as a means of institutionalizing and legitimizing structures of extreme
inequality in line with the ends of the American empire.
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more |.
Farewell, Comrade
Paul
Harry
Magdoff
This eulogy was read
by Robert W. McChesney at a memorial meeting for Paul M. Sweezy on April 17,
2004, in New York City.—The Editors
If I belong anywhere today, it is with
you. But to my great regret, I cannot be physically present. No doubt other
speakers will deal with Paul as a major theoretician, a worldwide influential
thinker and struggler for the sake of humanity. And there is much to say about
Paul the human being. Not to monopolize the stage, I have selected two areas to
dwell on: Paul as a friend and Paul as a coworker.
The Commitment of an
Intellectual: Paul M. Sweezy (1910-2004)
John Bellamy
Foster
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.
Paul M.
Sweezy
Michael A.
Lebowitz
Described by the Wall Street
Journal as "the 'dean' of radical economics," Paul Sweezy has
more than any other single person kept Marxist economics alive in North
America.* One work would be sufficient to have achieved this—The Theory
of Capitalist Development (first published in 1942). During the period of
the 1950s and 1960s, this was the book to which one turned to learn about
Marxist economics.
Why
Stagnation?
Paul M.
Sweezy
This is a reconstruction from notes of
a talk given to the Harvard Economics Club on March 22, 1982, and is reprinted
from the June 1982 issue of Monthly Review.
The question "Why Stagnation?"
has a rather special significance for me. I started my graduate work in
economics exactly fifty years ago this year. The cyclical downturn which began
in 1929 was nearing the bottom. Unemployment in that year, according to
government figures, was 23.6 percent of the labor force, and it reached its
high point in 1933 at 24.9 percent. It remained in the double-digit range
throughout the decade. Still, a recovery began in 1933, and it turned out to be
the longest on record up to that time. Even at the top in 1937, however, the
unemployment rate was still 14.3 percent, and it jumped up by the end of the
year. That also happens to be the year I got my Ph.D. Can you imagine a set of
circumstances better calculated to impress upon a young economist the idea that
the fundamental economic problem was not cyclical ups and downs but secular
stagnation?
Monopoly
Capitalism
Paul M.
Sweezy
Among Marxian economists "monopoly
capitalism" is the term widely used to denote the stage of capitalism
which dates from approximately the last quarter of the nineteenth century and
reaches full maturity in the period after the Second World War. Marx's Capital,
like classical political economy from Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill, was based
on the assumption that all commodities are produced by industries consisting of
many firms, or capitals in Marx's terminology, each accounting for a negligible
fraction of total output and all responding to the price and profit signals
generated by impersonal market forces. Unlike the classical economists,
however, Marx recognized that such an economy was inherently unstable and
impermanent. The way to succeed in a competitive market is to cut costs and
expand production, a process which requires incessant accumulation of capital
in ever new technological and organizational forms. In Marx's words: "The
battle of competition is fought by cheapening of commodities. The cheapness of
commodities depends, ceteris paribus, on the productiveness of labor, and this
again on the scale of production. Therefore the larger capitals beat the
smaller." Further, the credit system which "begins as a modest helper
of accumulation" soon "becomes a new and formidable weapon in the
competition in the competitive struggle, and finally it transforms itself into
an immense social mechanism for the centralization of capitals" (Marx,
1894, ch. 27).
Capitalism and the
Environment
Paul M.
Sweezy
This is a slightly modified version of
a paper prepared for the roundtable “Socialism in the World” held at
Cavtat, Yugoslavia, in October 1988. It first appeared in the June 1989 issue
of Monthly Review.
It is obvious that humankind has arrived
at a crucial turning point in its long history. Nuclear war could terminate the
whole human enterprise. But even if this catastrophic ending can be avoided, it
is by no means certain that the essential conditions for the survival and
development of civilized society as we know it today will continue to
exist.
Four Letters to Paul Baran
Paul M.
Sweezy
Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy carried on a
voluminous correspondence in the 1950s and early 1960s that constitutes perhaps
the foremost exchange of letters between Marxist political economists in the
second half of the twentieth century, comparable in some ways to Marx and
Engels's correspondence during the nineteenth century. The correspondence was a
necessity of their close working relationship since Paul Sweezy was living in
Larchmont, New York and editing Monthly Review while Paul Baran was
living on the other side of the continent in California and teaching at
Stanford University. Excerpts from a few of these letters, written by Paul
Baran, were published in the March 1965 issue of MR, later published as a
separate book (Paul Baran: A Collective Portrait). We are printing in
full four of the letters by Paul Sweezy here. References to the
"opus" have to do with their work on Monopoly Capital, which
occupied the two Pauls for most of a decade, until Baran's death in
1964.—The Editors
Remembering Paul
Tributes by: Salvador Aguilar, Ricardo
Alarcon, Samir Amin, Kenneth J. Arrow, Lourdes Beneria, Grace Lee Boggs, Pablo
González Casanova, Nirmal Kumar Chandra, Ossie Davis & Ruby Dee,
Rajani Desai, Doug Dowd, Barbara Ehrenreich, Miren Etxezarreta &
José Iglesias, Bill Fletcher, Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, Joseph
Halevi, David Himmelstein & Steffie Woolhandler, Ruth Hubbard, John Mage,
István Mészáros, Philip Morrison, Margarita Papandreou,
Leo Panitch, Prabhat Patnaik, Annette Rubinstein, Pete Seeger, John J. Simon,
Jeanne Singer, Frank Stilwell, Alice Thorner, Shigeto Tsuru, Immanuel
Wallerstein, and Howard Zinn.
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