Paul Marlor Sweezy
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Paul Marlor Sweezy (April 10, 1910 in New York - February 27, 2004) was a radical economist and the originator of a distinct brand of North American socialism. He was co-founder and co-editor of Monthly Review magazine.
Sweezy attended graduate courses in economics at Harvard from 1931-32. In 1932, he attended the London School of Economics for a year, during which time he became strongly influenced by marxism. He was influenced by Harold Laski’s lectures and Leon Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution. In 1938, he wrote his seminal work, The Theory of Capitalist Development: Principles of Marxian Political Economy.
In the 1930s, Sweezy was a member of the American League Against War and Fascism and various popular front organizations. He left Harvard to join the army in the fall of 1942. While working with the Army's research branch in London in 1943, he edited its monthly magazine European Political Report, which took an explicitly leftist, anti-fascist stance.
He was denied a tenured position at Harvard only because of his marxism. Realizing his marxism meant he could not obtain tenure, he gave up on teaching and founded a monthly magazine with Leo Huberman called Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. The first issue was released in May 1949 and Sweezy remained an editor for the rest of his life. Sweezy was a target of the anti-communist hysteria of the 1950s.
When noted journalist I. F. Stone was unable to find a publisher for his book disputing the official history of the Korean War, Sweezy and Huberman founded the MR Press.
In 1966, Paul Baran and Sweezy authored Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order, which Sweezy dedicated to Che Guevara.
In 1971, he wrote On the Transition to Socialism with Charles Bettelheim, arguing that attempts to utilize the market mechanism as the central means of building socialism would simply cause the restoration of capitalism. This was in conflict with commonly held ideas of socialist theory. Throughout his life he remained committed to a socialist future.
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