Some of you must have known Paul Sweezy personally. Rather than this deluge of stuff, perhaps an obit that helps acquaint people with Sweezy's life and work, nothing hagiographic, just an honest appreciation of the man and his work, would do much, much more than the blasting of bdl.
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Yes.
Below, an excerpt of an excellent commentary from the April 2000 edition of Monthly Review about the enduring importance of Sweezy's best known work.
DRM
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Monopoly Capital at the Turn of the Millennium by John Bellamy Foster
This article is dedicated to Paul Sweezy on his 90th birthday. It is also meant as a personal expression of my conviction that Monopoly Capital (1966) by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, which provided a rich analysis of capital accumulation and crisis rooted in insights from Marx, Keynes, Kalecki, and Schumpeter, is still the most useful starting point from which to view the historical evolution of the United States and other advanced capitalist economies. My intention in this article is to use that general analysis to comment on some of the central empirical developments within the economy in our time—in a new millennium and under conditions of the globalization of monopoly capital.
Economic analysts, as everyone knows, have widely differing views on the way the economy works. The single most important division lies between right and left—a division that has its roots in class. But even among those on the left there are areas of sharp disagreement. One of these is over the centrality of the Keynesian revolution to the development of economics. Did the revolution in economic thought, associated with thinkers such as Keynes and Kalecki, teach things that Marxist political economists should view as essential? Another disagreement is over the role of monopoly and competition. How central is the concentration and centralization of capital to our understanding of the workings of capitalism today—a full century after Marxists and other radicals first raised the question of monopoly capitalism? Whatever one's abstract theory is—and all theories by definition rely on a degree of abstraction—its usefulness lies in its capacity to make sense of everyday reality, while providing the strategic analysis necessary for practical revolutionary solutions.
Throughout its history, MR has advanced a theoretical view known as monopoly capital or stagnation theory. This perspective, outlined in Baran and Sweezy's Monopoly Capital, argued that Marx's "law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall" was no longer directly applicable to the monopoly capitalist economy that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century, and had to be replaced by a "law of the tendency of surplus to rise"—where surplus was defined as the difference between the wages of production workers and total value added. A key contradiction of capitalism in its monopoly stage is therefore that of rising surplus and the associated problems of surplus absorption.
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full at -
http://www.monthlyreview.org/400jbf.htm