> At 3:07 pm -0800 1/3/04, joanna bujes wrote:
>> No kidding. Why are the antics of a time-serving opportunist
>> deserving of so much bandwidth? Perplexed and slightly disgusted.
>
> Indeed. 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... <snip>
OK, a personal note - not an obit. Louis Uchitelle will have an obit in the NYTimes in the next day or two. I had read Baran & Sweezy's _Monopoly Capital_ (1966 - dedicated "For Che") in my last year at law school, and his earlier _The Theory of Capitalist Development_ (1942) in a study group in the early seventies. I learned more of importance from those 2 books than anything I had so far been taught.
At the end of the seventies the law firm i was with assigned me to get a 501(c)(3) - charitable tax exemption - for MR. I incorporated MR as a not-for-profit foundation in NY, and got the 501(c)(3) in the last years of the Carter administration. In preparing to do this, I met with Paul (and Harry Magdoff) for the first time.
I was in my thirties, Paul was nearing 70. In the gay life old men (like over 50) were just not there (except as johns). Paul - after Norman Manley, whom i had represented and wanted really badly - was the first old man I fell for. He was beautiful. Nothing ever happened (he was straight enough to have 3 wives and 3 kids - but note that the great gay litcritter F.O. Matthieson gave Paul enough money to start MR in 1949, right before his redscare induced suicide). What totally won me was Paul's generosity - with praise for getting the tax-exemption, with his attention and with his understanding.
Paul had been Schumpeter's prize student and TA. He was denied a tenured job due to his Marxism. In the McCarthy period he was hounded by the redbaiting coldwar filth (sadly still around, even here), and defied the inquisitors, asserting his First Amendment rights. Convicted, he eventually prevailed in the Supreme Court as the tide started to turn <http://www.monthlyreview.org/400jjs.htm> A year or two earlier he would have served some serious time. Yet when i asked him about the case, his entire interest was in the dynamic of the changes that ended McCarthyism. Above all, the civil rights struggle. He saw the end of McCarthyism in the light of the bravery of those who sat in the "white" seats in Alabama buses or college town lunch counters.
Paul saw capitalism leading only to barbarism, and quickly. What hope there is for humankind is the organized might of the propertyless of the world. He despised the hypocrites who condemn the violence of the poor, while luxuriating in the daily violence of class rule. A primary problem was the corruption of bureaucrats and markets in the first working peoples states. The cultural revolution was a brave and conscious attempt at a solution, and its failure was tragic.
After my primary client in the firm where i was a partner went out of business in 1990-1, I quit. Paul asked me to join the informal editorial committee of MR. Paul edited every word of every edition of MR until he was close to 90 years old. He had no patience with long sentences or technical language or displays of erudition. What he himself wrote was the model of elegance.
Here's what i wrote for the mag on Paul's 90th birthday, almost four years ago: The foremost privilege in my life has been working with Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff. Paul in the last ten years has focused his energy more intently as his physical powers have waned. I have watched closely how he has helped to steer MR's course through the various narrows of the last several years, and his ultimate practical rule has been a question of point of view. That is, that all interesting social questions, of theory and practice alike, can and should be asked from the perspective of the propertyless majority of humankind. A second ultimate rule: keep it short. My love and gratitude to Paul Sweezy.
john mage