Monthly review artices

James Farmelant farmelantj at juno.com
Thu Sep 16 14:38:58 PDT 1999


On Thu, 16 Sep 1999 16:43:31 -0400 Michael Yates <mikey+ at pitt.edu> writes:
>Ellen Wood has a very insightful article in the Sept. 1999 "Monthly
>Review" titled "The Politics of Capitalism." Also John Bellamy Foster
>has written a moving tribute to Paul Sweezy, written on the occassion
>of
>Sweezy's receipt of the Veblen-Commons Award last January.
>
>michael yates

I would suggest that there is now a days a lack of appreciation of Sweezy's stature as an economist even among Marxists. People might want to follow up their reading of Foster's tribute to Sweezy in the September issue of Monthly Review by reading Foster's article on Sweezy in *The New Palgrave: Marxian Economics* eds. John Eatwell, Murray Milgate, and Peter Newman. As a young economist Sweezy made important technical contributions to the field of a sort whose importance were recognized by mainstream as well as Marxist economists. Much of his earlier research was concerned with the theory of imperfect competition and the issue of secular stagnation. Sweezy made a major contribution to the theory of imperfect competition with his 1939 paper, "Demand Under Conditions of Oligopoly" in which he presented the kinked demand curve analysis of oligopolistic pricing, and which stands as one of the classic essays in price theory. Sweezy was one of the early backers of Keynesian economics (alongside Paul Samuelson and JK Galbraith) and he was one of the authors of *An Economic Program for American Democracy* which provided a Keynesian rationale for increased public expenditures during the New Deal era. Sweezy like Harry Magdoff worked in a variety of New Deal agencies including the NRC (National Resources Committee) where he did research on the concentration of economic power.
>From this research, he wrote a study "Interest Groups in the
American Economy," which was published as an appendix to the NRC's 1939 report, *The Structure of the American Economy*. Sweezy established his credentials as a leading Marxist economist with his 1942 book, *The Theory of Capitalist Development*.

Jim Farmelant

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