An interview with Harry Magdoff - co-editor of the 'Monthly Review' - Interview

Monthly Review, May, 1999 by Christopher Phelps

The twentieth anniversary issue of Monthly Review in May 1969 carried the announcement that Harry Magdoff - the independent economist - had officially joined Paul Sweezy as co-editor, replacing Leo Huberman, who had died in 1968.

Born in 1913 in the Bronx, son of a house painter, Magdoff attended the City College of New York where he became a member of the Social Problems Club and editor of Frontiers, the club's monthly periodical. In 1932, he traveled to Chicago to attend the founding conventions of the National Students League and the Youth League Against War and Fascism. On that trip, he married fellow New York student Beatrice Greizer (familiarly known as Beadie, to whom he has been married ever since). He was editor of the NSL's national publication Student Review in 1932-1933. After being expelled from City College for his activism, he attended New York University, receiving a B.S. in economics in 1936. He accepted a position in Philadelphia with the Works Progress Administration's national research project, for which he conducted studies of the labor force, unemployment, industrial capacity, and productivity. In 1940, he moved to Washington, D.C., to take charge of the civilian requirements division of the National Defense Advisory Commission. After U.S. entry into the Second World War in 1941, he served with the War Production Board. Near the end of the war, he was the chief economist in charge of the Current Business Analysis Division at the Department of Commerce, where he oversaw the Survey of Current Business. He spent his final years in government as special assistant to Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace. In 1948, he was summoned before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Unemployed, he returned to New York, where he took various jobs, sometimes anonymously, in financial analysis and insurance before joining the staff of Russell & Russell, a publisher of scholarly out-of-print books, between 1959 and 1965. Magdoff returned to the fore as a public Marxist intellectual with "Problems of United States Capitalism," an essay in The Socialist Register 1965, edited by Ralph Miliband and John Saville (London: Merlin Press). Widely recognized for his economic analysis of imperialism, Magdoff is author of The Age of Imperialism (1969) and Imperialism: From the Colonial Age to the Present (1977), and co-author with Paul Sweezy of 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), all from Monthly Review Press.

The following interview was conducted by Christopher Phelps in New York City on September 20, 1998.

YOUTHFUL RADICALISM

Q: I thought I'd begin, Harry, by being a little unfair to you and reading from an old piece of yours.

MAGDOFF: That's a terrible thing to do!

Q: See if you can guess when this was written: "Very often, particularly in the classroom, imperialism is defined as the policy of a government aimed at conquering or controlling foreign territories. . . . In its attempt to be all-inclusive, to take in all attempts at foreign conquest, this definition excludes the key to the understanding of each. It covers everything but explains nothing. There is a difference between the colonial annexation by highly developed monopoly capitalism searching for markets and raw materials, and the colonial projects of slaveholding Rome."

MAGDOFF: That's from The Age of Imperialism, isn't it?

Q: That's from the Student Review in 1932.

MAGDOFF: No!

Q: Absolutely. Sounds like Monthly Review, doesn't it?

MAGDOFF: I just can't believe it. I thought it was from the book.

Q: So the germs of your thought were present way back then. How did you become a radical? I take it your parents were not, particularly.

MAGDOFF: No, they weren't, but I lived in an environment where radicalism was not strange. When the Russian Revolution took place - the first revolution, the Kerensky revolution - the family had relatives on the Lower East Side whom we were visiting, half-sisters of my father. We went by elevated train. The train was a madhouse. There were people with bottles of whiskey, drinking and singing. It was all, "Down with the tsar!" Normally, how would an American boy, age five or so, have any consciousness about the tsar and the fact that this was something to celebrate?

Secondly, the First World War. My uncle was called, and to my mother it was like her son, almost. After the draftees got their papers, they were supposed to come together for reporting. It was in a schoolyard, and I was with him. I saw women crying - sweethearts, mothers. In one case I heard of a mother who couldn't come, because she couldn't take it.

So the idea of war and revolution was all part of my experience in the immigrant community.

Q: Then, at City College, you became more of a conscious and organized radical?

MAGDOFF: No, I was already radical. I had read a lot of Marx by the time I got to City College: the Critique of Political Economy, the Manifesto, and a great deal more.