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| isolated freak |
Posted
on 04-Mar-04 08:56 AM
Although, I do not believe in what Paul preached all his life, and what MR does now, I think of him someone who was a genius, and knew how to write clearly. Also, when the whole of US Publishing houses were afraid of publishing books on China, he went ahead and published among others, the Willian Hinton classic, Fan Shen, which every student of Modern Chinese History in the US universities and colleges are required to read.
Obituary - The Guardian:
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Paul Sweezy
A leading American Marxist economist, he founded the socialist magazine Monthly Review
John J Simon
Thursday March 4, 2004
The Guardian
The American economist Paul Sweezy, who has died aged 93, was initially an unlikely socialist prospect. The son of a vice president of the First National Bank of New York (predecessor to Citibank), Sweezy went on to become the author of The Theory Of Capitalist Development (1942) and many other works of socialist theory. That book, a clear and straightforward definition of Marxism and how to use its tools of economic and social analysis, became a key volume during the radical wave that swept over the west during the 1960s and early 70s.
Its value, and the rest of his journalistic and scholarly contribution, to be found in more than 100 articles and 20 books, was confirmed in mainstream circles when the Wall Street Journal described him as the "dean of radical economists". John Kenneth Galbraith called him the "most noted American Marx ist scholar" of the second half of the 20th century.
Sweezy was educated at Philips Exeter Academy, an elite New England boarding school, and Harvard University, where he edited the undergraduate daily, Crimson, and studied neoclassical economics. In 1932, he went on to the London School of Economics. At the LSE, in those shattering early years of the great depression, Sweezy went through a political and intellectual transformation provoked by the rise of Hitler, student agitation, his friendships with the young economists Joan Robinson, Oskar Lange, and Abba Lerner, and not least of all, the transfixing lectures of the LSE's professor of political science Harold Laski.
Sweezy returned to Harvard in 1933 as he put it, "a convinced but very ignorant Marxist". There, he took a doctorate, wrote an acclaimed dissertation on the coal cartel during the English industrial revolution (1938), became an instructor in the economics department, began work on The Theory Of Capitalist Development, and helped found the Harvard Teachers Union.
Mentored by the conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter, Sweezy developed an undogmatic approach to economics, incorporating, especially, the analytic tools of John Maynard Keynes. Although his association with Schumpeter evolved into a deep lifelong friendship, he was not afraid to confront his hero. Nobel laureate and fellow Harvard graduate student Paul Samuelson recounts a celebrated debate between "the foxy Merlin" (Schumpeter) and the "young Sir Galahad" (Sweezy) who had "established himself as among the most promising economists of his generation".
In 1948, Sweezy and labour journalist Leo Huberman worked in Henry Wallace's quixotic Progressive Party presidential campaign. Wallace, supported by the leftwing of the trade union movement - liberal, socialist, communist and radical remnants of Franklin Roosevelt's 1930s new deal - stood on an anti-cold-war platform and lost decisively.
Sweezy and Huberman thought one of the reasons for the Wallace movement's failure was its reluctance to articulate socialist alternatives. What was needed in the US, they thought, was a periodical offering an understanding of current affairs from just such a perspective. So in 1949, in the teeth of the mounting cold war, a time when the House Un-American Activities Committee was in action and incipient McCarthyism was gathering momentum, they launched Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine.
Despite the worsening political climate, MR, as it become known, went on to become one of the most influential radical forums. Its contributors were to include Albert Einstein, WEB DuBois, Jean-Paul Sartre, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Malcolm X, GDH Cole, Eduardo Galeano, C Wright Mills, Daniel Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky, EP Thompson, Ralph Milliband, Joan Robinson, and Isabel Allende.
Then in 1954, Sweezy himself was ensnared in the McCarthyite maelstrom. Convicted for refusing to turn over notes for a lecture he had given at the University of New Hampshire, he received a jail sentence for "contempt", later overturned by the US Supreme Court. That decision, in 1957, was one of several that led to the gradual end of the anti-left witch hunts.
In 1960, in the wake of the revolution that brought Castro to power, Sweezy and Huberman travelled to Cuba to study developments in education, nationalisation of industry, and land reform. In a special issue of MR, Cuba: Anatomy Of A Revolution - which achieved a huge international sale - they concluded that the transformation which was taking place there was of a socialist character. They made this claim nearly a year before Castro did and may well have influenced him to do so.
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| isolated freak |
Posted
on 04-Mar-04 08:56 AM
MR's interest in the Cuban revolution prefigured a growing engagement with revolution in the developing world. Increasingly, Sweezy turned his attention to economic, political, and environmental issues in the third world. In 1971, he wrote that "the principal (capitalist) contradiction ... is not within the developed part but between the developed and undeveloped parts", an argument that found an enthusiastic audience among many of those opposing US imperial projects in Vietnam and elsewhere.
After Huberman's death in 1968, Sweezy asked Harry Magdoff, a former New Deal economist, to become co-editor of MR. These were heady times for MR. Magdoff's book, The Age Of Imperialism (1969) joined Sweezy's work and Monopoly Capital (1965), by Sweezy and Stanford University Marxist Paul Baran, as near-essential read ing for young radicals.
In the 1970s and 80s Sweezy lectured in Japan, India, Europe and the Americas. Increasingly interested in environmental issues, he wrote a classic article on cities and cars and the dangers of "automobilisation". He also had a lively exchange in the 1970s with the British Communist economist Maurice Dobb on the transition from feudalism to capitalism. And he and Magdoff published a sympathetic special issue of MR on liberation theology.
Witty, and charismatic, Sweezy had a wide circle of friends, colleagues, and comrades, and an energetic social life. He was married three times and is survived by his second wife, Nancy, his third, Zyrel, and three children, Samuel, Lybess, and Martha.
· Paul Marlor Sweezy, economist, born April 10 1910; died February 27 2004
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| isolated freak |
Posted
on 04-Mar-04 08:57 AM
MR's interest in the Cuban revolution prefigured a growing engagement with revolution in the developing world. Increasingly, Sweezy turned his attention to economic, political, and environmental issues in the third world. In 1971, he wrote that "the principal (capitalist) contradiction ... is not within the developed part but between the developed and undeveloped parts", an argument that found an enthusiastic audience among many of those opposing US imperial projects in Vietnam and elsewhere.
After Huberman's death in 1968, Sweezy asked Harry Magdoff, a former New Deal economist, to become co-editor of MR. These were heady times for MR. Magdoff's book, The Age Of Imperialism (1969) joined Sweezy's work and Monopoly Capital (1965), by Sweezy and Stanford University Marxist Paul Baran, as near-essential read ing for young radicals.
In the 1970s and 80s Sweezy lectured in Japan, India, Europe and the Americas. Increasingly interested in environmental issues, he wrote a classic article on cities and cars and the dangers of "automobilisation". He also had a lively exchange in the 1970s with the British Communist economist Maurice Dobb on the transition from feudalism to capitalism. And he and Magdoff published a sympathetic special issue of MR on liberation theology.
Witty, and charismatic, Sweezy had a wide circle of friends, colleagues, and comrades, and an energetic social life. He was married three times and is survived by his second wife, Nancy, his third, Zyrel, and three children, Samuel, Lybess, and Martha.
· Paul Marlor Sweezy, economist, born April 10 1910; died February 27 2004
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| isolated freak |
Posted
on 04-Mar-04 09:00 AM
"The Monthly Review was attractive to people who were leaving the Communist Party and other sectarian groups," said John Bellamy Foster, a co-editor of the publication now. "It was and is Marxist, but did not hew to the party line or get into sectarian struggles."
That reflected Mr. Sweezy's approach in the 100 articles or so that he wrote over the years and the more than 20 books he signed as author, co-author or editor. The most famous was "Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order" (Monthly Review Press, 1966), with Paul A. Baran as co-author.
That book argued that unregulated market economies have a tendency to stagnate and to develop oligopolies in which a few companies dominate each industry and keep pushing up prices, fattening profits for the oligopolies but damping economic activity because of a lack of price competition.
What saved the United States from that fate in the 1960's, the authors wrote, were temporary phenomenon: military spending, robust consumerism and the growing demand for autos because of rapidly expanding suburbs and the new Interstate highway system.
Paul Marlor Sweezy was born on April 10, 1910, the youngest of three sons of Everett P. Sweezy, vice president of First National Bank of New York, and Caroline Wilson Sweezy. He earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1931 and his Ph.D. in 1937. By then he was a Marxist, having taken that step during a year at the London School of Economics.
"I became convinced," he wrote much later, "that mainstream economics of the kind I had been taught at Harvard had little to contribute toward understanding the major events and trends of the 20th century."
Still, back at Harvard, as a graduate student and then an instructor, he came in contact with Schumpeter and a friendship flourished, although they supported different solutions for ending the Depression. For Schumpeter, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal measures suppressed entrepreneurs in their normal process of creative destruction and innovation.
For Mr. Sweezy, who borrowed from Keynesian theory as well as Marxism, government planning and intervention had a role, although working people also had to intervene. Listening to their debates, Paul Samuelson, the Nobel laureate, spoke of Schumpeter as "the foxy Merlin" and Mr. Sweezy as the "young Sir Galahad" who early on "established himself as among the most promising economists of his generation."
During World War II, Mr. Sweezy spent four years in the Army as an officer in the Office of Strategic Services. After returning briefly to Harvard as a teacher and having failed to gain a tenured position, he left in 1946 to pursue the goal of establishing "a serious and authentic American brand of Marxism."
The pursuit was not easy in the McCarthy era. He found himself in the courts in the 1950's after he refused to turn over to the attorney general of New Hampshire his notes from a lecture at the University of New Hampshire. The attorney general accused him of subversive activities and the case eventually went to the United States Supreme Court, which ruled in Mr. Sweezy's favor.
Mr. Sweezy's first wife, Nancy, and his second wife, Zirel, survive, as do three children, Samuel, Lybess and Martha; two stepchildren, Jeffrey and Jennifer Dowd; seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
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| isolated freak |
Posted
on 04-Mar-04 09:00 AM
here's anotehr obitury from yesterday's The New York Times:
Paul Sweezy, 93, Marxist Publisher and Economist, Dies
By LOUIS UCHITELLE
Published: March 2, 2004
Paul M. Sweezy, a Harvard University economist who left academia and became the nation's leading Marxist intellectual and publisher during the cold war and the McCarthy era, died Saturday at his home in Larchmont, N.Y. He was 93.
The cause was congestive heart failure, his daughter, Lybess Sweezy, said.
Mr. Sweezy did not think of himself as a Stalinist or sectarian. His Marxism developed as a response to the Great Depression, and his mentor was a famed conservative economist, Joseph Schumpeter, who counted on spirited entrepreneurs to lift the economy through a process of destruction and rebuilding. While Schumpeter wanted less government, Mr. Sweezy wanted more to offset what he considered capitalism's failings.
Still, the two men worked together at Harvard in the late 1930's and early 1940's. Schumpeter cited his young friend in several of his own works and endorsed Mr. Sweezy for a tenured professorship at Harvard, even campaigning on his behalf. The slot went to a non-Marxist, and Mr. Sweezy soon left academia. Because of an inheritance from his father, a banker, he had enough money to support himself. Mr. Sweezy later told friends that if he had been forced to work for a living, he might have been more of a conformist.
Instead, in 1949 he became co-founder and co-editor of The Monthly Review, an independent Marxist journal published in Manhattan that he continued to edit and contribute to until well into the 1990's. The magazine still appears, although its monthly circulation has fallen to 7,000, from 12,000 at its peak in the 1970's. For the first issue, Albert Einstein contributed an article titled "Why Socialism?" and over the years the bylines included such famous radicals or Marxists as W. E. B. Du Bois, Jean-Paul Sartre, Che Guevara and Joan Robinson.
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| isolated freak |
Posted
on 04-Mar-04 09:09 AM
, which every student of Modern Chinese History in the US universities and colleges are required to read.
read this as: , which every student of Modern Chinese History in the US universities and colleges is required to read.
Also, MR published the famous Braverman classic, Labor and the Monopoly Capital.
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