I took a lazy sideswipe at Baran and Sweezy's Monopoly Capitalism in my pamphlet Need and Desire (1998), cribbed mostly from Paul Mattick, Istvan Meszaros (Power of Ideology) and the late Geoff Pilling (Philosophy of Marx's Capital).
As I remember it the Baran-Sweezy theory of growth was abstracted from its character as capital accumulation, they arguing that the surplus could be considered apart from its character as surplus value. The Meszaros/Pilling critique was that Baran-Sweezy's was simply a radical version of modernisation theory, that assumed modernisation as a given.
Since growth and modernisation are now roundly dismissed as unworthy goals by all from the Green Party to the World Bank, the criticism of the implicit modernisation theory in Baran and Sweezy, too, fell by the wayside (or in effect the critics became mainstream).
Meszaros demonstrated the inner relationship between ecologism and modernisation in his pamphlet The Need for Social Control:
'"The God that failed" in the image of technological omnipotence is now revarnished and shown around again under the umbrella of universal "ecological concern"'. (p19. Reproduced in Beyond Capital, Merlin, 1998ish).
In message <004701c03306$ac2ca040$3b89f7a5 at gcmm7>, Chris Kromm
<ckromm at mindspring.com> writes
>Hey everyone,
>
>I was wondering: what are some the present-day critiques of Paul Baran's
>"The Political Economy of Growth"? What are some schools of thought that
>have emerged that oppose and/or support his thesis? Is he generally
>dismissed now, or does the basic approach still hold up?
>
>Thanks in advance,
>Chris
>
-- James Heartfield