保罗·斯威齐

保罗·斯威齐生平简介
　　保罗·斯威齐（Paul Marlor Sweezy，1910.4.10—2004.2.27），不幸于2004年2月27日因心脏病去世，享年93岁。斯威齐是20世纪美国最为著名的马克思主义经济学家，在继承和发展马克思主义经济理论方面颇有成就。
　　斯威齐于1910年4月10生于纽约，在兄弟三人中他排行第三，父亲是纽约国民银行副总裁，后来他继承了父亲一大笔遗产。他1931年从哈佛大学获得学士学位，1937年又从哈佛大学获博士学位。1932年至1933年他曾在英国伦敦经济政治学院进修，这期间他成为一个马克思主义者，因为他认识到：西方的主流派经济学无助于理解20世纪的重大事变和社会发展趋势。然而，能够解释这些问题的马克思主义，在英、美又受到忽视和浅薄对待，这方面的英文出版物也极少。这种现状激起了斯威齐要建立“严肃的和真正的北美牌马克思主义”的愿望。1942年出版的《资本主义发展论》（Theory of Capitalist Development）正是由这个愿望所结出的第一个硕果，这本书奠定了他作为一个马克思主义经济学家的地位，也结束了他在哈佛大学的多年教学生涯。二战期间，他在战略服务局服役4年，二战后，回到哈佛大学任教，后因未能谋得终身教职，而于1946年离开哈佛大学，除了在一些大学或研究机构担任客座教授外，专心于创立严肃的、真正的北美牌马克思主义的事业，这主要体现在他于1949年创办左翼杂志《每月评论》（Monthly Review），并任该刊主编直至辞世。
　　几十年来，在《每月评论》杂志社，他同几位志同道合者共事，发表了大量揭露和批判现代资本主义的文章和专著，其中最为著名的有《作为历史的现在》（1953）、《垄断资本》（与保罗·巴兰合著，1966年）、《繁荣的终结》（与哈里·麦格道夫合著，1981年）、《革命后社会》（1982年）、《马克思主义四讲》（1982年）。这些论著有着极为广泛的影响，故此，日本现代经济研究会曾把他列为自魁奈以来30位大经济学家之一。
斯威齐对马克思主义政治经济学的理论贡献

　　1、斯威齐进入马克思主义经济学之后的第一个贡献就是他的成名作。

　　1942年出版的《资本主义发展论——马克思主义政治经济学原理》。在这本书中，斯威齐对马克思经济学，特别是《资本论》，进行了特别有说服力的创新性解释。他几乎考察了所有的基本问题，从劳动价值论，一直到利润率下降。但，这并不是说他的这本著作只是一部引证性的著作——收集和排列引语。他将马克思的思想进行了公允的也是清晰的表述，同时也提出了他自己的思想。
　　通过《资本主义发展论》，斯威齐奠定了其一生从事马克思主义政治经济学研究的立论基础和研究方法，并显示了很高的独创性。
　　从方法论上讲，斯威齐明确表示要继承马克思的科学抽象法和看待社会问题的历史（变革）眼光。因此，既遵循《资本论》第1卷所实践的由具体到抽象的步骤，以把握资本主义的本质——剩余价值的生产和资本家的积累冲动，又学习《资本论》第2、3卷所更多运用的由抽象再上升到具体的方法，在分析中纳入先前有意识舍象的某些因素，以解释现实中存在的事物。斯威齐认为，通过这种方法，可以发展马克思主义，对马克思来不及分析或语焉不详的问题做出自己的答案。
　　关于立论基础，斯威齐一方面确实以马克思主义的基本观点为圭臬，如劳动价值论、剩余价值学说、利润率下降趋势、积累与劳动后备军理论、国家学说、资本积聚与集中学说以及资本主义过渡性学说等等。但同时，他也很注意历史上在马克思主义者内外部的论争以及当代西方学者对垄断资本主义运行的种种观察。其书中有相当多的篇幅用于介绍、鉴别和评论各种相关的和相悖的学说，并有所扬弃和综合，其中特别受人注意的人：肯定和补充博尔特凯维奇在价值转化为生产价格问题上对马克思的修正（经此介绍和补充之后，这一问题后来引起了长达20年的论战），介绍第二国际理论家在“实现危机”和“崩溃”问题上的争论、重申罗莎·卢森堡对修正主义的阶级调和论和“议会道路”论的批判以及吸收希法亭关于帝国主义意识形态的观点。
　　斯威齐对于马克思用利润率下降来解释经济危机的看法持批评态度，并进行了有力的论证。但他不仅只是批评，他还发展了马克思著作中关于消费不足论的思想线索，虽然他认为马克思这种消费不足论的思想在《资本论》中并未得到像利润率下降理论那样充分的论证。斯威齐在充分挖掘马克思著作中消费不足论思想的基础上，结合凯恩斯的有效需求理论，提出了一个以资本积累为动因的消费不足危机理论，意谓永不满足的剩余价值贪欲，驱使资本家阶级不断地提高积累率和资本有机构成。于是，在消费方面就呈现为：一方面资本家阶级的消费增长落后于全部剩余价值的增长，同时新增积累中工资支付的部分在减退；另一方面，消费品的产量却至少是同生产资料投入量同比例增长，结果就有消费量增长落后于消费品产量增长的趋势，迟早便有物价下跌和产量削减的经济危机，或是生产能力长期得不到充分利用的停滞；即使存在着抵消消费不足的因素，也未能从根本上将这趋势扭转。这个危机和停滞理论，既不同于对资本主义基本矛盾讳莫如深的资产阶级的（凯恩斯）的有效需求论或小资产阶级的（如西斯蒙第）消费不足论，也不同于（多布和普利赛尔等所误解的）单纯的利润率下降危机论，更不同于把生产同消费截然分开的杜冈-巴拉诺夫斯基的比例失调论。然而，与资本积累相联系的消费不足，又包容了利润率下降的因素，也体现了一种比例失调，所以，在斯威齐看来，这个危机理论既可以把散见于《资本论》各卷看似不同的马克思的各种言论统一起来，又可以避免马克思主义者们各执经典一词而产生的混乱。
　　通过对资本积累过程的矛盾分析，斯威齐对垄断资本主义经济的运行做出了创造性的和细致的描述。他指出，积累是垄断的正常伴侣，因为积累扩大了生产单位的规模，而规模经济效益正是促使竞争走向集中和垄断的基本动因；反过来，垄断把剩余价值从较小块的资本转向较大块的资本，这就提高了积累在一定量剩余价值中的比重。对价格高于均衡值、产量低于均衡值的垄断资本来说，高额利润本已有了保证，现在垄断提高了积累率，有招致利润率下降的可能，垄断组织更不愿意在自己的禁脔内使用其积累，而宁可将新资本投于行业之外或国外的竞争性领域，并且更注意采用节约劳动力的新技术，这就加剧了竞争性领域中利润率下降和消费不足的趋势，即增添了危机和萧条的诱因。可以看出，斯威齐对于垄断资本主义经济的运行，有着比马克思和列宁更具体的分析。由此，斯威齐又为列宁在1916年提出的著名命题“帝国主义是资本主义的垄断阶段”注入了新的内容。比如，他指出：保护贸易的政策，有时不是自卫，而是进攻，即便利本国垄断资本对外国倾销；资本输出诚然是在国内投资机会不多且民众贫困的条件下进行，但国内投资机会减少和民众贫困又恰恰是由垄断资本的对外投资决策（追求较高边际利润率和减轻国内劳动力市场压力）所造成；帝国主义固有其经济、政治根源，也有垄断资本所歪曲和煽动的民族主义意识在作祟。他对于帝国主义的一个特殊形式法西斯主义的剖析，无疑是马克思主义经典作家前所未有的；对帝国主义极限的界定，亦颇有新意。
　　可以说，斯威齐的《资本主义发展论》，虽然是以“马克思主义政治经济学原理”为副题，却不仅是一本在英语国家中普及马克思主义政治经济学的教材，也是用马克思的方法与基本原理解释当代资本主义运行的专著。有人甚至认为，即使在今天，这本书对于那些想要认真了解马克思主义思想的学生来说仍然是最好的入门书。

　　2、斯威齐在马克思主义经济学领域最为重要的贡献体现在他与保罗·巴兰合著的《垄断资本》（Monopoly Capital）。

　　《垄断资本》被认为是战后西方最重要的马克思主义经济学著作之一，它代表着当代西方马克思主义经济学者中一个学派——垄断资本学派—— 的形成。此书所阐述的理论，尤其是其中所阐述的垄断资本主义“停滞理论”，对西方学术界特别是激进经济学派产生了更为重大的影响。
　　巴兰和斯威齐认为他们的理论是卡莱茨基（Kalecki）和斯坦德尔（Josef Steindl）的思想的继续发展。他们在著作中明确提出：把微观理论和宏观理论重新结合起来的先导者是卡莱茨基，“他不仅‘独立地发现了（凯恩期的）《通论》’，而且还是第一个把他所称的‘垄断程度’包括在他的综合的经济模型之中。在同一方向继续走出一大步的（这在很大程度上是受了卡莱茨基的影响），是约瑟夫·斯坦德尔在《美国资本主义的成熟与停滞》（1952年）。任何熟悉卡莱茨基和斯坦德尔著作的人都很容易看出，本书作者利益于它们是非常之大的。如果我们没有更频繁地引用他们的话，或没有更直接地利用他们的理论表达，其原因是，为了我们的目的，我们已经找到了一种更方便和更合用的不同的处理方式和表达方式。”
　　巴兰和斯威齐力图在一个巨型公司和大政府的时代中抓住马克思主义的精神，它主要关注美国——正如马克思在他的时代中关注于英国——将其作为最重要和最先进的资本主义经济。它也以30年代的大萧条与40年代由战争引致的经济复苏作为背景。在理论上的处理方式和表达方式，要比斯坦德尔简明得多。在他们的理论中，中心范畴是经济剩余（即剩余），整个理论“是环绕着一个中心论题来组织并获得本质上的统一的：在垄断资本主义条件下剩余的产生和吸收”。所谓经济剩余，它的“最简短的定义，就是一个社会所生产的产品与生产它的成本之间的差额”。斯威齐和巴兰认为，垄断资本主义条件下存在着“剩余增长”的趋势，而不是“利润率下降”趋势。剩余趋于增长是因为巨型公司具有垄断定价权力，所以他们可以从美国经济中的非垄断部门和欠发达国家剥削剩余。对于这个系统的内部逻辑的基础性问题就是所谓的“剩余吸收”问题，即谁将购买这些垄断巨型公司生产出来的物品？
　　由剩余增长和剩余吸收难题，他们进一步推论，垄断资本主义是一个自相矛盾的制度。“它总是形成越来越多的剩余，可是它不能提供为吸收日益增长的剩余所需要的因而是为使这个制度和谐运转所需要的消费和投资出路”，所以垄断资本主义必然存在着停滞的趋势。他们强调，如果不存在对停滞趋势的抵消力量，垄断资本主义制度早就应当自行崩溃了。他们指出了三种一般的抵消力量：企业的销售努力、政府的民用支出和政府的军事支出。他们将大政府和帝国主义拉进其垄断资本主义模型的作用之中。尤其认为军事支出对于购买剩余产品是必要的；这样我们需要冷战和帝国主义，以阻止经济再次滑入萧条。这里又一次可以看到斯威齐与凯恩斯主义的联系，以及与当时走出大萧条的历史经验的联系：将我们带出大萧条的就是为战争而支付的巨大的赤字支出。这也是军事凯恩斯主义使之清晰的一种观点。

　　3、斯威齐一生最为重要的事业就是他创建《每月评论》（Monthly Review）杂志，并担任编辑（co-editor）达50年之久，应当说这是他对于马克思主义所做出的最大贡献。

　　《每月评论》作为一个理论阵地，它维持并团结着一个严肃认真的马克思主义左派，这些人始终关心谈论的是实际的世界，而不致沦落到或者是偶像崇拜的马克思主义教条的重复或者只是关注学术界琐细的地步。在维持政治经济学对于马克思主义的中心位置方面它也起了关键性的作用。每月评论甚至形成了所谓“每月评论学派”。这一学派在20世纪70、80年代持续地对于帝国主义和欠发达予以关注。这也与众所周知的“依附学派”相关。只不过每月评论学派给依附学派的主张中加入了更多马克思主义精神。
　　半个多世纪以来，《每月评论》存在着，发展着，度过了黑暗的麦卡锡时期（McCarthy period），60年代时它曾是左派的标志。这之后，仍然继续关注着我们这个时代，注意从马克思主义角度研究新现象、新问题。其中更为主要的仍然是斯威齐本人的贡献，他在20世纪的后半期，主要与麦格道夫合作，记录下正在出现和发展中的资本主义的新形态，即在资本主义运行中变得日益重要的金融的作用，这被称为“金融化”。应当说他们二人是左派中最先注意到这种现象并给予理论关注的人。他们以其一贯典型的严谨态度，从马克思主义基础理论出发，考察“金融化”的更为广泛的内涵，展示了马克思主义与时俱进的理论品格。所以，有人从《每月评论》的社会影响以及估量斯威齐一生对左派的贡献角度，将《每月评论》列为斯威齐一生中的第一贡献，是恰当其分的。
斯威齐对西方主流经济学的主要理论贡献
　　在哈佛大学攻读博士学位和任教期间，斯威齐就已显露了很高的才华，师从当时最著名的经济学家熊彼特（Joseph Schumpeter），全面而系统地学习西方主流经济学。虽然两人的政治观点和学术观点相异，但斯威齐仍得到了熊彼特的器重，并与熊彼特结下了很深的友谊，。两人曾就“如何结束大萧条”及“资本主义的未来”等问题发生争论，熊彼特认为罗斯福新政意味着对正常发生的创造性破坏和创新过程中的企业家的压制，而斯威齐既吸收了马克思主义又借鉴凯恩斯的观点，认为政府计划和干预有其必要性，劳动人民的干预更有其必要性。目睹他们的争论，后来的诺贝尔经济学奖获得者萨缪尔森（Paul Samuelson）回忆时将熊彼特比为“聪明而睿智的魔法师（the foxy Merlin），将斯威齐比作“年轻的圆桌骑士”（young Sir Galahad），认为斯威齐很早就已“将自身列入他那一代人当中最有前途的经济学家之列了”。
　　斯威齐在早期主流经济学的学习和研究中就已取得了很高的成就，在攻读博士学位期间，他在寡占企业定价问题上提出了一种新的解释，称为“折弯的需求曲线”（kinked demand curve），这种需求曲线的折弯指的是寡占企业因其定价权力而能够在正常的平滑需求曲线所能允许的范围之外进行高定价。这在微观经济学和产业组织经济学中是很重要的一个贡献。对此贡献还有一个小插曲，有一位主流经济学家，很显然对左派和斯威齐后来转向马克思主义茫无所知，在一次聚会中曾说过这样的话： “还记得斯威齐这家伙吗？他提出了折弯的需求曲线理论，多么优秀的年青经济学家，可惜那么早就死了！”
对斯威齐总的评价
　　简单说来，从《资本主义发展论》开始，在长逾半个世纪的学术研究活动中，斯威齐的兴趣始终集中在两个方面：分析以垄断、帝国主义和世界性为特征的现代资本主义经济的运行，和探索资本主义向社会主义的过渡。斯威齐在其学术研究中，始终贴近现实，既遵循马克思的方法和基本思路，又有自己的创新，在比较和鉴别中坚持和弘扬马克思主义的基本原理。这使他身处垄断资本主义大有发展的20世纪，理论联系实际而有相当出色的理论创新。应当说，经过他一生的努力，加之其他一些志同道合者的支持，他实现了其创立“严肃的和真正的北美牌马克思主义”的愿望。
　　另外，应当指出的是，美国的社会环境，尤其是二战后50年代的麦卡锡时期，对于一个坚持马克思主义、批判资本主义的学者来说殊为艰难。但斯威齐仍以其作为和主张显示了其理论信仰的坚定性和学者的道德勇气。他所遭遇的案例即美国最高法院对“斯威齐诉新罕布什尔州政府”一案的判决后来也被人们用作学术自由乃至终身教职制度的司法依据：
　　1951年，新罕布什尔州议会通过法案，全面管制颠覆活动。其中规定，颠覆分子不得受雇于州政府，包括不得成为公共教育机构的教师。1953年，州议会决定调查颠覆活动。1954 年，斯威齐两次被检察官传唤，接受质询。他对两类问题避而不答，一类涉及其妻子、朋友与进步党的关系，另一类涉及他在课堂上讲述社会主义、马克思主义的内容。他的理由是，这些问题与主旨无关，而且侵犯了宪法修正案第一条所保护的公民权利。检察官要求斯威齐到法庭上回答这些问题。在法庭上，斯威齐因拒绝回答而被判蔑视法庭罪，遭到监禁。此后，州最高法院支持检察官的要求，要求斯威齐必须回答这些问题。此案最后一直上诉到联邦最高法院。1957年，联邦最高法院推翻州最高法院的判决，支持了斯威齐。大法官沃伦的判词不仅充分肯定了学术自由的必要性，也对其内容做了界定（即四项自由）：“自由在美国大学里的重要性几乎是不言而喻的。任何人都不应低估那些对我们的青年进行指导和训练的人所起的关键作用。把任何紧身衣强加给我们大学的思想导师身上都会危害我们国家的未来。如果对任何一个教育领域不做如此理解，就不可能有任何新的发现。社会科学领域尤其如此。在怀疑和不信任的氛围中，学术不能繁荣。教师和学生必须永远自由地追问、自由地研究、自由地评价、自由地获得新的成熟和理解，否则我们的文明将会停滞乃至灭亡。”另一位法官法兰克福特在附加意见中指出：“任何政府对大学知识活动的干涉”都可能危害教师的基本职能。
对斯威齐的主要著作《作为历史的现在》（1953）《繁荣的终结》（与哈里·麦格道夫 （Harry Magdoff）合著，1981年）《马克思主义四讲》（1982年）《资本主义发展论——马克思主义政治经济学原理》（1942）《垄断资本》(与保罗·巴兰合著，1966年)《论向社会主义过渡》（1972年）《革命后的社会》（1982年）《再谈（或少谈）全球化》（1993年）《在毛泽东诞生一百周年纪念会上的讲话》（保罗·斯威齐、哈里·麦格道夫）（1993年12月11日）《《共产党宣言》在当代》（1998年） Paul Sweezy
　　（1910.4.10—2004.2.27）
Paul Sweezy is best known in economics for two not-so-distinct concerns which have dominated his economics: analyzing monopolistic competition and updating Marxian thought into "Neo-Marxian" economics.　His work on the former is best exemplified by his discovery of the "kinked" demand curve for oligopoly (1939) and his prize-winning study on the English coal industry (1938).
Sweezy encountered Marxian theory soon enough and in his majestic 1942 book, Theory of Capitalist Development, helped reintroduce Marxian thought to economics - in particular drawing attention to Marx's "Transformation Problem" and the theory of crisis. Sweezy subsequently translated B鰄m-Bawerk's classic 1896 critique of Marx as well as Hilferding's response. He also became involved in an infamous debate with Dobb on the issue of the transition from feudalism to capitalism (e.g. 1976).
It was hardly surprising, then, that this young Harvard economist was to became a favorite of Schumpeter's and an anathema to the American government (Sweezy was summoned and jailed for "contempt" by the McCarthyite New Hampshire legal establishment in 1953 - a conviction only overturned in 1957 by the US Supreme Court (see statement by Sweezy)).
Sweezy was also a proponent of an "underconsumption" interpretation of Marx, a new theory of imperialism rooted in "dependency" and the examination of Keynesian demand management as a life-valve for capitalism - ideas commonly associated with the Monthly Review, which Sweezy helped found in 1949 and which he edited for the rest of his career which was to be highly influential on the emerging "New Left". Sweezy saw these ideas as a way of modernising the Marxian theory of crisis and he set them forth both in his numerous writings in the Monthly Review and, perhaps most famously, in his highly influential Monopoly Capital (1966) written with Paul Baran.　
Mr. Sweezy cofounded the Marxist journal The Monthly Review in 1949. He edited and wrote about 100 articles for the journal, which currently has a monthly circulation of about 7,000. Other contributors included Albert Einstein, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jean-Paul Sartre, Che Guevara, and Joan Robinson.
Mr. Sweezy wrote more than 20 books, including a well-known collaboration with Paul Baran, "Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order" (1966). Throughout his career, he argued that government and working people had to cooperate to overcome what he saw as capitalism's limitations.
Born in New York City, the son of a J.P. Morgan banker, Mr. Sweezy attended Philips Exeter Academy and Harvard University, where he was president of the Harvard Crimson.
While working on his doctorate at Harvard, Mr. Sweezy had as a mentor famed economist Joseph Schumpeter, the preeminent defender of free enterprise who lauded the "creative destruction" of vibrant capitalism. Their friendship deepened even as their economic viewpoints diverged.
As the Great Depression lingered, Mr. Sweezy became an advocate of greater government control of the economy. "I became convinced 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," he later wrote.
Schumpeter and Mr. Sweezy's debates became legendary in some circles at Harvard. One, titled "The Future of Capitalism" and held at a packed hall at the Littauer Center, was retold decades later in Newsweek by Nobel laureate and MIT professor Paul Samuelson, setting the scene as one "back in the days when giants walked the earth and Harvard Yard."
"Unfairly, the gods had given Paul Sweezy, along with a brilliant mind, a beautiful face and wit. With what William Buckley would desperately wish to see in the mirror, Sweezy laced the world," Samuelson wrote.Samuelson called them "foxy Merlin" (Schumpeter) against Mr. Sweezy's "young Sir Galahad.""The neat parrying and thrust . . . all made more pleasurable by the obvious affection that the two men had for each other despite the polar opposition of their views."
During World War II, Mr. Sweezy worked in the research department of the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency.He later returned to Harvard as an instructor, but failed to secure a tenured position and left the university in 1946.
In the 1950s, during the height of McCarthyism, the New Hampshire attorney general accused Mr. Sweezy of subversive activities after he refused to turn over some lecture notes. The case ended up in the Supreme Court, which ruled in Mr. Sweezy's favor.
A Saint and A Sage：Paul Marlor Sweezy (1910 - 2004)
Prabhat Patnaik　Paul M. Sweezy who died on February 28 was an outstanding intellectual, a part of a galaxy of Marxist economists which included, among others, Maurice Dobb, Michael Kalecki, Oskar Lange, Paul Baran and Josef Steindl. All of them worked, at least for long stretches of time, in the advanced capitalist world, where they not only enriched the Marxist tradition and influenced thousands of young scholars, but also made profound and original contributions to the discipline, making it more socially sensitive and relevant, and setting its intellectual agenda for nearly six decades.
Sweezy came from a prosperous East Coast American family: his father was the Vice-President of the First National Bank of New York. He was rich, brilliant, and extraordinarily handsome. (Alice Thorner, the well-known scholar on contemporary India who was a friend of Sweezy, was a part of the Monthly Review family, and belonged, with her late husband Daniel, to the same circle of East Coast radicals as Sweezy, before being forced to emigrate during the McCarthy years, describes him as having the stunning looks of a "Greek God"). He went to Harvard as a matter of course, where he and the renowned "mainstream" economist Paul Samuelson, were among the favourite students of Joseph Schumpeter. His doctoral dissertation on Monopoly and Competition in the English Coal Trade 1550-1850 (which was published in the same Harvard series as Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis) was much more than an excursus into economic history; it was a critical and brilliant examination of Alfred Marshall's "biological" theory explaining the rise and decline of firms, which was so influential at the time.
It was common for the children of the East Coast establishment to have a stint in England, preferably at the London School of Economics, before settling down to their chosen careers, and accordingly Sweezy went for a while from Harvard to LSE. (John F. Kennedy for instance was to do the same some years later). At LSE he duly enrolled to attend the lectures of Friedrich Von Hayek, whom Lionel Robbins had brought from the continent to counter the influence of Keynes in English intellectual life. Hayek's strong and persistent attacks on Marx in the course of his lectures persuaded Sweezy to make a proper study of Marxism. At the end of that study he was a Marxist! And the result of that study was his magnum opus, The Theory of Capitalist Development (1942), its title inspired by his old teacher Joseph Schumpeter's book, The Theory of Economic Development. (The English edition of Sweezy's book with a foreword by Maurice Dobb was published in 1946.)
Meanwhile Sweezy had joined the economics faculty at Harvard; but when the time came for Harvard to take the "up or out" decision in the case of Sweezy, the clear pointer was towards an "out" decision, his Marxist predilections having become apparent meanwhile. Sweezy did not wait for the decision; he resigned from the Harvard faculty. It is ironical that both Sweezy and Samuelson, representing very different ideological positions, had to suffer victimization at Harvard, though each for a different reason: Sweezy for his Marxism, and Samuelson allegedly for his Jewishness. But while Samuelson migrated only a few hundred meters to join and build up the economics faculty at MIT, Sweezy gave up his academic career altogether, and set up, along with his friend Leo Huberman (well-known for his excellent introduction to Marxism, Man's Worldly Goods), a journal Monthly Review, which, it would be no exaggeration to say, became the most significant socialist journal anywhere in the world in the English language. (Among its first set of contributors was Albert Einstein with his essay "Why Socialism"?)
The popularity of Monthly Review arose from its simplicity, its concreteness, and its concern with the third world. It did not have any of the narcissism, the Euro-centrism, and the penchant for "smartness", for "high-browism", and for coquetry with words that one often finds in many European Left journals. The reason for this contrast lay partly in its American-ness (which in "highbrow" European Left circles is often referred to as American "moralism" but one of whose constituents is a very large dose of honesty); it lay partly in the predominance of economics in MR, a subject, which though technical, does not easily lend itself to highbrowism (and MR's economics got a solid anchorage in empirical research once Harry Magdoff, a reputed applied economist of the Left and a former member of the Roosevelt administration joined Sweezy as a co-editor); it lay partly in Sweezy's own extraordinary clarity of mind; but it lay above all in the centrality of imperialism in MR's overall theoretical perspective. No other Marxist journal in the English language (and that naturally excludes Jean-Paul Sartre's Les Temps Moderne) kept imperialism so firmly in the centre of the picture as MR (and Harry Magdoff was to write an extremely influential book on the subject The Age of Imperialism), which is hardly surprising, since it was a journal coming out of the leading metropolis of the leading imperialist power of the post-war period.
Of particular interest to MR readers were the "Notes of the Month" which the editors used to write in every issue of MR, which gave a remarkable insight inter alia into the functioning of American capitalism. (These have been collected in several volumes under the co-authorship of Sweezy and Magdoff and published by Monthly Review Press).
Sweezy did not keep himself confined to editing MR and writing outstanding books. He was an activist who threw himself into all the major political issues that came up during his eventful life, from the defence of the Soviet Union , to the fight against fascism, to the defence of the Cuban Revolution (Che Guevara was a personal friend of Baran and Sweezy), to the struggle against US aggression on Vietnam, to solidarity with the student upsurge of the late sixties.
In 1954, at the height of the McCarthyite witch-hunt, Sweezy was summoned on two occasions to appear before the Attorney General of New Hampshire who had been conferred wide-ranging powers to investigate "subversive activities". Upon his refusal to answer questions he was declared to have been in contempt of court and sent to the county jail (though he was released on bail). His appeal against the contempt verdict was turned down by the New Hampshire Supreme Court, but upheld eventually by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1957.
The revival of interest in Marxism on the campuses in the late sixties led to Sweezy's visiting several universities to lecture on Marxism, until he discovered that University administrations were using his visits as an excuse for denying tenure to young Marxist scholars. Their argument was that a tenured faculty of Marxist scholars was unnecessary in view of the availability of distinguished Marxists from outside. Upon learning this, Sweezy discontinued these visits. During the war, when the Left supported the war effort against fascism, Sweezy was associated with the Office of Strategic Security (OSS) which was to become the precursor of the CIA.
Someone once remarked that while Sweezy's The Theory of Capitalist Development was the most significant work on the Left produced in America in the decade of the forties, Paul Baran's The Political Economy of Growth was the most significant work on the Left produced in America in the decade of the fifties, and Baran and Sweezy's Monopoly Capital was the most significant work on the Left produced in America in the decade of the sixties. Monopoly Capital, dedicated to Che, took ten years to write, and Baran passed away before it was published. Sweezy not only brought out the joint work but lectured widely to spread the central message of the book. When he was invited to deliver the prestigious Marshall lectures at Cambridge University, U.K., the theme he chose was: "The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism".
After the programme of two lectures was over at Cambridge, there was the official reception, at which Joan Robinson happened to be discussing the lectures with a group of people that included myself. She ended the discussion by saying: "I disagree with Paul on several issues, but he is a real saint." The term may appear odd being applied to a Marxist, but what stood out about Paul Sweezy, in addition to his brilliance, his intellectual calibre and his profound commitment to the cause of socialism, was a nobility of character that is indeed extremely rare to find.
Sweezy's enduring contribution to "mainstream" economics is the so-called "kinked demand curve" which oligopolists are supposed to face. The idea that in oligopoly markets a reduction in price by any seller leads to retaliatory reductions by others while an increase in price does not lead to any corresponding increase, thus giving rise to a "kink" in the perceived demand curve of each seller at the prevailing price, was originally advanced to explain the stability in oligopoly price. But the idea is a powerful one which can be incorporated into a variety of theories about oligopoly pricing; it constitutes the primary explanation of why price competition is eschewed under oligopoly.
But Sweezy himself was rather dismissive about this paper even as he was writing it. And in any case, this contribution pales into insignificance in comparison with his awesome achievement, The Theory of Capitalist Development (TCD). TCD was remarkable for a number of reasons: first, it was an extraordinarily lucid presentation of Marx's ideas on economics, one which has remained unsurpassed in the more than six decades that have elapsed since it first appeared. Secondly, it was a convincing demonstration of the proposition that the essentials of Keynes' ideas which were then shaking the world were already embedded in Marx's writings, a proposition that was remarkably bold and original in a situation where orthodox Marxists were treating Keynesian theory with barely concealed animosity. Thirdly, it introduced to the English-speaking readers for the first time a whole range of Marxist economic ideas that had developed in the continent by thinkers from Kautsky, to Hilferding, to Grossman, to Rosa Luxemburg, to Tugan-Baranovsky, to Louis Boudin, to Otto Bauer, to Nikolai Bukharin. The fact that there was an extraordinarily rich literature in the Marxist economic tradition was brought home to the Anglo-Saxon world with a vengeance. Fourthly, it provided a cogent explanation of contemporary phenomena, such as inter-imperialist rivalry, and fascism, starting from the basics of Marxist economic theory, not as accidental or conjunctural occurrences, but as phenomena rooted in the political economy of capitalism. And finally, and most significantly, it advanced a theory of "underconsumption" which was to dominate the Marxist economic discourse thenceforth. Indeed both Baran's The Political Economy of Growth, and Baran and Sweezy's Monopoly Capital were basically re-iterations and refinements of the "under-consumptionist" theory first advanced in TCD.
"Underconsumptionism", which refers to the view that a shift in the distribution of social income away from the workers to the capitalists, produces, through shrinking demand, a tendency towards stagnation under capitalism, was of course an old idea. It had been advanced by a host of writers from Sismondi to Hobson, to Luxemburg, to Otto Bauer. Sweezy's, and Baran's, contribution was to argue that "underconsumptionism" was an ex ante tendency (which I shall explain shortly), and to eliminate thereby a whole range of confusions surrounding the theory. The theory for the first time acquired a rigorous totality.
The standard objections to "underconsumptionism" were two-fold: first, there was no perceived tendency towards secular stagnation in the capitalist world. True, the inter-war years had witnessed the "Great Depression" which had persisted until the start of re-armament (in fascist countries earlier, and in liberal capitalist countries under the fascist threat), but this did not amount to a secular tendency, since post-war capitalism had experienced remarkable growth rates. Secondly, there was not even any statistical evidence to show that the share of profits in output was rising in the advanced capitalist countries as predicted by the underconsumptionist argument. (Nicholas Kaldor had made this point in a review of Paul Baran's book).
Baran and Sweezy's ingenious answer to these objections can be explained with a simple arithmetical example. Suppose the total output is 100, of which wages constitute 50 and profits 50; workers' consumption is 50, capitalists' consumption is 25 and investment is 25. Now suppose that the distribution changes to 40:60 between wages and profits, and that capitalists' consumption and investment remain unchanged. Since workers cannot consume beyond their wages, total demand in the economy would be only 90 compared to 100 earlier. But if the State chips in with an expenditure of 10 which it raises through a tax on profits, then we shall once again have an output of 100, and (post-tax) profits of 50 (though the wage bill would be 40).Neither the total output nor the share of post-tax profits in it would have changed compared to the initial situation, even though clearly there has been an ex-ante tendency towards underconsumption. In other words, the ex ante tendency towards underconsumption, which underlies the new situation, is not (and indeed is scarcely ever) directly visible: it has called forth and is therefore camouflaged by State intervention. This, Baran and Sweezy argued, is exactly what was happening in post-war capitalism, where State intervention, taking the form of larger military expenditure, had prevented the realization of the ex ante tendency towards underconsumption.
This argument whose empirical merit we need not go into here, had however the following implications: first, since advanced capitalism had succeeded to a large extent in manipulating its internal contradictions, the main resistance to it could come only from the "outlying regions" of the third world where its military might was being put to use for imposing a new imperial order (in which, as Magdoff was to argue, the need for raw materials played a crucial role); secondly, it is its oppressiveness and irrationality, as opposed to any internal politico-economic crisis arising from its unworkability on account of the playing out of its immanent laws, that constituted the real flaw of contemporary capitalism. The system in other words was not one that got bogged down in crises and stagnation, but one that worked by wasting huge amounts of resources on maintaining a military machine for terrorizing the world, especially the third world.
A similar view was held at the time by many; it was explicitly articulated by Herbert Marcuse, among others. Not surprisingly however it brought forth accusations against Baran and Sweezy in traditional Left circles in the advanced capitalist countries, which were disturbed at the absence of any explicit role of significance for the metropolitan proletariat in the latter's scheme of things, that they were being "moralists" and "third worldists". The reference to "moralism" as a trait of the American Left complemented this; even Joan Robinson's reference to Sweezy as a "saint" had a faint echo of this perception (its laudatoriness reflecting her own ideological position which was Left Keynesian). The other side of the same coin however was Baran and Sweezy's recognition of the pre-eminent role of imperialism, which, as already mentioned, scarcely gets the attention it deserves in traditional Marxist writings in the advanced capitalist countries. Baran and Sweezy's alleged "third worldism" in other words was but the obverse of the centrality of imperialism in their perception. There is a tension here which I shall take up later.
Of course advanced capitalism has developed a whole range of new contradictions, arising from the emergence of a new form of international finance capital and the globalization of finance that it promotes, which have undermined the scope for State intervention of the Keynesian kind that Baran and Sweezy had taken for granted in Monopoly Capital. Nonetheless the tendency towards underconsumption highlighted by them has to be reckoned with as a basic element in any analysis of contemporary capitalism. (This tendency however need not be analyzed only within the confines of the advanced capitalist world in isolation: a relative shift of income from the poor of the world to the rich can also contribute to this tendency).
The emphasis on underconsumptionism in Sweezy was not an isolated intellectual act; it was an integral part of Sweezy's Marxism. After the publication of Maurice Dobb's Studies in the Development of Capitalism, Sweezy had been involved in a famous debate with Dobb (a debate in which Rodney Hilton, Takahashi and Christopher Hill had joined later) on the transition from feudalism to capitalism (because of which the debate is sometimes referred to as the "Transition Debate"). That debate need not be reviewed here but the essential point of Sweezy's intervention, on the basis of Henri Pirenne's work, was that the opening up of Mediterranean trade had played a crucial role in the undermining of feudalism and the ushering in of capitalism. (Dobb's reply to this was that the impact of trade depended on the internal state of the mode of production under consideration, and that trade had even given rise to a "second serfdom" in Eastern Europe).
The real point about Sweezy's intervention to my mind however had been to underscore the role of demand-side factors; and even his underconsumptionism was concerned with demand-side factors. In other words there is a continuity of thought in Sweezy between his underconsumptionism and his stance in the transition debate. But since the question of demand is supposed to belong to the realm of circulation as distinct from the realm of production to which Marxism accords primacy, those Marxists who have been concerned with the demand-side have often been attacked for diluting Marxism, the classic example of which was Bukharin's attack on Rosa Luxemburg. At the same time however if one does not consider the demand-side and hence the sphere of circulation, and remains confined to the realm of production alone, then one necessarily remains focussed on an isolated capitalist economy, where the workers and the capitalists face one another in the production process, and there is no necessary role for imperialism, in the inclusive sense covering both the colonial and what Lenin called the imperial phases, in the process of capital accumulation. One can introduce imperialism into the analysis in such a case only as an empirical factor (e.g. the fact that capitalism cannot do without tropical raw materials), but it has no role in the Law of Motion of capitalism. It is not accidental that even a scholar like Maurice Dobb who was committed to the traditional Marxist emphasis on the production side could not incorporate the role of primitive accumulation of capital in the form of colonial loot into his analysis of the transition to capitalism.
Putting the matter differently there has been, as mentioned earlier, a tension within Marxist analysis between those who have given primacy to the production side to the exclusion of the demand side and hence willy-nilly missed the significance of imperialism, and those who have paid greater attention to the demand side, and therefore been more sensitive to the role of imperialism, but in the process willy-nilly deviated from many of the traditional Marxist emphases. It is not surprising then that the alleged weaknesses of Sweezy's Marxism can also be considered to be the real strength of his analysis, and have been so considered.
No doubt with further development of Marxist theory the tension just alluded to would get resolved in due course (through the emergence of a richer Marxist understanding); but to that further work, and indeed to the recognition of the need for that further work, Paul Sweezy would be celebrated as having made a seminal contribution. He would be celebrated not only as a saint but also as a sage.
March 16, 2004.