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Paul M. Sweezy (1910–2004)

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Paul M. Sweezy (1910–2004) Foster.qxd 9/27/2004 3:18 PM Page 5 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 con- veys 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 bril- liance, and personal warmth. It was an immense, indescribable gift. I first saw Paul when I was still a teenager. He had just returned from China and was speaking at the University of Washington in Seattle to an enormous crowd that seemed to dwell on his every word. In my twenties when I was a graduate student at York University in Toronto Paul took me under his intellectual wing after I sent him a manuscript that I had written entitled, “The United States and A note on the text: A version of this biographical essay was originally made available on MR’s website a few days after Paul died and was widely referred to by writers and jour- nalists throughout the world. It appears here in print in the magazine for the first time. In addition to providing an account of Paul Sweezy’s life and work it also contains very brief biographies of Paul Baran, Harry Magdoff, and Harry Braverman, since their contributions were in many ways inseparable from his.—Eds. 5 Foster.qxd 9/27/2004 3:18 PM Page 6 6 MONTHLY REVIEW / OCTOBER 2004 Monopoly Capitalism: The Issue of Excess Capacity.” My earlier work for my master’s degree had been on the political economy of Joseph Schumpeter, who had been Paul’s close friend and in a sense mentor, and my sharing of that work as well brought us closer together. For the next quarter century Paul and I communicated regularly—correspond- ing weekly, talking on the phone, and conversing in person during the few occasions each year in which we were able to get together. I visit- ed him a number of times at his house in Larchmont, New York. I wrote my first article for MR in 1981 on the subject of monopoly capi- talism. Soon afterwards I began working together with Henryk Szlajfer on an edited collection of essays entitled The Faltering Economy: The Problem of Accumulation Under Monopoly Capitalism (Monthly Review Press, 1984) that was meant to explain the origins and devel- opment of the monopoly capital theory. I wrote my dissertation on The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy, published in expanded form by Monthly Review Press in 1986. In all of this Paul was a constant source of encouragement. Beyond mere intellectual support, Paul’s friendship extended to all the exigencies of life and if I had a personal or family crisis he was always there helping with his incomparable friendship and advice. Very soon after I met Paul and Harry Magdoff I began to help them with MR in all the ways I could and by the end of the 1980s I was a director of the board of the Monthly Review Foundation and a mem- ber of the informal editorial committee of the magazine. In this dual capacity I saw Paul a couple of times a year. In the year 2000 I became coeditor of Monthly Review, along with Paul, Harry, and Bob McChesney. This was a time when Paul’s declining health had cur- tailed his active involvement and Bob and I stepped in feeling it was necessary to do what we could, together with Harry, to save the mag- azine. I can imagine no more important intellectual task for a socialist than to try to continue on the path that Paul and Harry (and in the beginning Leo Huberman) charted. Paul was a heroic figure in the modern struggle for socialism. His last words to me as he neared the end and faded in and out of consciousness were “I knew you were still there.” He was referring to my relation to MR and the struggle that it embodied. For me this was the highest compliment. Paul’s dedication to the struggle for humanity and socialism, which could not be sepa- rated from his love for his own family and friends, remained with him up until the time of his death. For those of us who knew and loved Paul the commitment to equality and justice will always run that much Foster.qxd 9/27/2004 3:18 PM Page 7 THE COMMITMENT OF AN INTELLECTUAL 7 deeper because it was embodied in his life, and now, in our memories of him.—JBF Paul M. Sweezy, referred to by The Wall Street Journal in 1972 as “the ‘dean’ of radical economists,” was, in the words of John Kenneth Galbraith, “the most noted American Marxist scholar” of the second half of the twentieth century.1 Sweezy’s intellectual influence, which was global in its reach, lay chiefly in two areas: as a leading radical economist (and sociologist), and as the principal originator of a distinct North American brand of socialist thought in his role as cofounder and coedi- tor of Monthly Review magazine. Like both Marx and Schumpeter, to whose thought his work was closely related, Sweezy provided a histori- cal analysis and critique of capitalist economic development, encom- passing a theory of the origins, development, and eventual decline of the system. Paul Marlor Sweezy was born April 10, 1910, in New York. His father, Everett B. Sweezy, was vice president of the First National Bank of New York, then headed by George F. Baker, a close partner of J. P. Morgan and Company. His mother, Caroline (Wilson) Sweezy was in the first gradu- ating class of Goucher College in Baltimore. He had two older brothers, Everett, born 1901, and Alan, born 1907. All three brothers went to Exeter and then to Harvard. In the early years, Paul followed in the footsteps of his brother Alan. Both Alan and Paul were editors of the Exonian and then later presidents of the Harvard Crimson. Both studied economics at the undergraduate and graduate levels at Harvard. Paul had all but com- pleted his senior year at Harvard when his father died in 1931, interrupt- ing his studies. Consequently, he did not graduate (magna cum laude) until the following year in 1932. In 1931–32, however, having already fin- ished his undergraduate studies, he began graduate courses in economics at Harvard. It was during this time that his interests shifted decisively from journalism (an early and important influence on his work) to eco- nomics. In 1932 Sweezy went to England for a year’s study at the London School of Economics (LSE). During school breaks he also studied for sev- eral months in Vienna. These experiences changed his life and outlook considerably. Like many he had been shaken by the onset of the Great Depression. His father had lost the greater part of his fortune in the 1929 stockmarket crash, although enough remained to ensure a comfortable existence. In Britain Sweezy was awakened by the intellectual and polit- ical ferment in response to the deepening depression and Hitler’s rise to Foster.qxd 9/27/2004 3:18 PM Page 8 8 MONTHLY REVIEW / OCTOBER 2004 power in Germany. His initial intention in attending the LSE was to work with the conservative economist Friedrich Hayek. However, in the heat- ed debates then taking place, particularly among younger scholars, Sweezy found himself increasingly attracted to Marxism. Lectures that he attended by Harold Laski at the LSE and his reading of Leon Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, which had just been translated into English, were key influences inducing Sweezy’s change in perspective. He was also affected by the rapid developments in economics in England during this period. It was at this time that he became acquainted with some of the younger, left-leaning Cambridge economists, including Joan Robinson. In 1933 Sweezy returned to the United States to continue his graduate studies in economics at Harvard where the intellectual climate had been dramatically transformed. Marxism, which in his prior years at Harvard had played no part in his education, had by then become an important topic of discussion. One big change was the arrival at Harvard of Joseph Schumpeter, one of the foremost economists of the twentieth century. A conservative economist, Schumpeter nonetheless had enormous respect for the economics of Karl Marx, even going so far—as Sweezy once put it—“to build a structure of thought which was to rival Marx.
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