Paul M. Sweezy

Monthly Review, Oct, 2004 by Michael A. Lebowitz

Biographical Note

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. (1) 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. As Meghnad Desai testified years later (in the introduction to his own text in Marxian economics):

      There was in those days one book that students could read if they
   wanted to acquaint themselves with Marx's thought. The Theory of
   Capitalist Development, when all is said and done, still remains a
   classic introduction to Marxian economics .... It was a definitive
   statement of a certain period about how Marx and his system were a
   key to the understanding of capitalism. While the book comes in for
   much casual criticism today, Paul Sweezy can be credited for having
   kept the eventual prospect of a revival of Marxian economics alive.
   (2)

Similarly, two German writers, Gerd Hardach and Dieter Karras, commented in 1974 that "as an analytical and exhaustive resume of the history of Marxist theory up to the 1930s, Sweezy's book is still without any rivals today." Lending support to Desai's point, they noted that, on the eve of the rebirth of West German Marxism, the 1959 German edition of the book "made available to the German reader a theoretical tradition which had been very largely produced in German-speaking areas and then subsequently effectively suppressed by fascism and the postwar restoration." (3)

Yet, The Theory of Capitalist Development was not only an introduction to Marxian economics and a transmission of a theoretical tradition. Sweezy also initially formulated there his general theory of capitalist stagnation. It is a theory which has been offered to explain not only the Depression conditions of its origin but also the postwar boom (the "Golden Age") and the subsequent crisis of the 1970s and 1980s.

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More than the author of a single text, however, Paul Sweezy has probed for answers about society and social change in many directions. His questions in relation to Maurice Dobb's Studies in the Development of Capitalism in 1950 triggered a major debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism whose echoes reverberate today--just as a later exchange with Charles Bettelheim would pose critical questions about the transition to socialism. From his book on the Cuban Revolution (with associate Leo Huberman) to his emphasis on capitalism as a world system to his essays on post-revolutionary societies, Sweezy has addressed the important questions of our time; and no one could say (as he has about neoclassical economists) that he has concerned himself with "smaller and decreasingly significant questions" with the result that there is "a truly stupefying gap between the questions posed and the techniques employed to answer them." (4)

For many, though, it is for his joint work with Paul Baran, Monopoly Capital, that he will be remembered. Begun in the mid-50s, a time of "full-fledged McCarthyism" when "it was practically impossible for Marxist dialogue to exist within the U.S. academy," the book became upon its publication in 1966 the introduction to radical economic analysis for an entire generation of university students and an important influence on the New Left of the period. (5) But, Sweezy has never rested on his laurels. In Monthly Review (the magazine founded in 1949 by Sweezy and Huberman), he and his co-editor Harry Magdoff continue to analyze current economic developments and to explore their theoretical significance. After over a half-century of Marxist scholarship, the dean of radical economics continues to guide (and to receive graciously) younger colleagues and students.

None of this is the trajectory which could have been predicted at the time of Sweezy's birth in New York City on April 10, 1910. Sweezy's father was a banker, one of five vice presidents of the First National Bank (a predecessor of the Citibank), and Paul had the background appropriate to the scion of a wealthy family. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy and then went on to Harvard (as had his brother Alan before him). During his time there from 1928 to 1932, he edited the Harvard Crimson and was trained in the standard neoclassical economics. (6)

There was no sign here of his future path. And, there certainly was no indication that this banker's son would become the object of a McCarthyist witch hunt by a New Hampshire subversive activities committee. Questioned in 1953, he was found guilty of contempt of court and sentenced to jail. While out on bail, he appealed the charge which was ultimately overturned in 1957 by the U.S. Supreme Court in one of the landmark decisions on McCarthyism. (7)

The year of his graduation, 1932, was of course a time of troubles. The period to follow brought the stock market crash, bank failures, the onset of the Depression of the 1930s, the rise of Hitler and the First Soviet Five-Year Plan. And, as for so many others, these events represented a challenge to the education Sweezy had received. What, after all, did this have to do with the neoclassical economics that he had studied at Harvard?