[Marxism] Pollin on Sweezy

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Counterpunch, Weekend Edtion
March 6 / 7, 2004

Remembering Paul Sweezy
"He was an Amazingly Great Man"
By ROBERT POLLIN

When news came that Paul Sweezy had died we turned to Robert Pollin, once a
student of Sweeezy's, for input on Sweezy's economic contributions. Pollin
is professor of economics at U Mass, Amherst, at the Political Economy
Research Institute, which he and his colleagues have made into a power
house of research, most notably into the living wage campaigns across the
US, most recently in New Mexico and Louisiana, which Pollin pioneered. A
few months ago we reviewed here Contours of Descent: US Economic Fractures
and the Landscape of Global Austerity, Pollin's superb book on the US
economy in the Clinton and early Bush years. Pollin swiftly responded with
the extremely enlightening reflections below. AC.

Dear Alex,

Here are some thoughts on Paul Sweezy.

First, on his major intellectual and political contributions:

There is no doubt that Paul was the leading Marxian economist in the United
States, and probably the world, during his lifetime. Certainly he was the
most widely recognized and respected. In my view, he made four major
intellectual/political contributions.

1. His book, Theory of Capitalist Development (first published, I believe
in 1942), was an extraordinarily cogent explanation of the economics of
Karl Marx, in particular the main themes of Capital. Paul went through all
the basic issues, starting with the labor theory of value, and getting all
the way to the falling rate of profit. However, this was not merely a work
of exegesis-of collecting and assembling quotes. Paul presented a clear and
fair treatment of Marx, but he also developed some ideas of his own.
Perhaps most important, Paul was critical of the falling rate of profit
explanation of economic crisis in Marx-and that criticism was all the more
powerful because Paul presented Marx's arguments in such a clear way. But
Paul went further than criticism: he also developed the underconsumptionist
strains in Marx's writings, which were not as well developed in Capital as
the falling rate of profit arguments. No doubt, Sweezy was strongly
influenced by the pull of JM Keynes in developing the underconsumptionist
arguments in Marx. Keynes said the macroeconomic problem of capitalism was
effective demand-and that was the cause of the 1930s depression. Sweezy saw
this point coming out of Marx, and well before Keynes. [By the way, Keynes
himself acknowledged Marx, along with some obscure people, like Silvio
Gessel, as predating him with an underconsumptionist perspective]. I will
come back to this Marx/Keynes connection in Sweezy. But the main thing on
Theory of Capitalist Development is that it was a classic, incredibly
clear, exposition of Marxian economics. It remains today the first place I
would send a student who wants to get the basics of Marx in a serious, but
still totally accessible way.

2. The next big book was, of course, Monopoly Capital, written with Paul
Baran, though Baran died before they finished the manuscript. This book
tried, and succeeded in many ways, to bring Marxism alive for its time. It
was not another exposition of Marxian economics per se, and it did not use
Capital in an orthodox way. It was trying to capture the spirit of Marxism
in an era of giant corporations and big government capitalism. It focused
on the U.S., deliberately, in the way Marx focused on England in Capital-as
the most important and advanced capitalist economy. It was also written
with the 1930s depression and 1940s war-induced amazing recovery as the
background. Thus, Sweezy and Baran hypothized about a "tendency of surplus
to rise" rather than the profit rate to fall. Surplus would rise because
big corporations had monopolistic pricing power, and so they could extract
surplus both from non-monopolistic elements of the U.S. economy, and from
less developed countries, which at the time included everyone. The
fundamental problem to the internal logic of this system was then, what
they termed "surplus absorption"-who was going to buy the things that the
corporations could produce? This is how they linked up the issue of big
government and imperialism with the functioning of the monopolistic
capitalist model. They said military spending was necessary to buy up the
surplus product; and thus we needed the cold war, and imperialism, to
prevent the economy from again lapsing into depression. Here again you see
the links with Keynesianism, and with the obviously powerful experience of
coming out of the depression: the only thing that brought us out of the
depression being, obviously, massive deficit spending to pay for the war.
And here is where the idea of military Keynesianism becomes very clear.

full: http://www.counterpunch.org/pollin03062004.html


Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org


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