Paul Sweezy

A leading American Marxist economist, he founded the socialist magazine

Monthly Review
John J Simon

Thu 4 Mar 2004 08.56 GMT First published on Thu 4 Mar 2004 08.56 GMT

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.

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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.

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

Acesso em https://www.theguardian.com/news/2004/mar/04/guardianobituaries.obituaries
no dia 14/12/2018.