The Age of Monopoly Capital

Selected Correspondence of Paul M. Sweezy and Paul A. Baran, 1949-1964

Paul M. Sweezy, Paul A. Baran, John Bellamy Foster, Nicholas Baran

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781583676530
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Letters
• Index: Literature

The rich correspondence that preceded the publication of Monopoly Capital Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy were two of the leading Marxist economists of the twentieth century. Their seminal work, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order, published in 1966, two years after Baran's death, was in many respects the culmination of fifteen years of correspondence between the two, from 1949 to 1964. During those years, Baran, a professor of economics at Stanford, and Sweezy, a former professor of economics at Harvard, then co-editing Monthly Review in New York City, were separated by three thousand miles. Their intellectual collaboration required that they write letters to one another frequently and, in the years closer to 1964, almost daily. Their surviving correspondence consists of some one thousand letters. The letters selected for this volume illuminate not only the development of the political economy that was to form the basis of Monopoly Capital, but also the historical context—the McCarthy Era, the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis—in which these thinkers were forced to struggle. Not since Marx and Engels carried on their epistolary correspondence has there has been a collection of letters offering such a detailed look at the making of a prescient critique of political economy—and at the historical conditions from which that critique was formed.

1

The Early Postwar Years 1949–1952

[1949]

PMS to PAB

Wilton, N. H.
February 17, 1949

Dear Paul,

Many thanks for the Modern Review which I have already returned. It is a stinker, isn’t it, and Hilferding’s article is amazing for one who had been so clear-headed.¹ Also for the reference to Estrin [Samuel Efimovich]. I have written to him (more than a week ago) but have heard nothing as yet. Meanwhile another friend of mine has written me the following information, based on clippings about the time of H’s death. I wish you would check it for accuracy and also add anything you can (including, of course, anything the chap who works at the FRB [Federal Reserve Bank—referring coyly to Paul Baran himself] may know):

“Hilferding was in Berlin from 1919-1933 mainly as a lecturer in a S.D. [Sozial Demokratisch] school and writer for SD papers. He had been a doctor and was on the Austro-Italian front during World War I. He left Berlin in 1933 and stayed in Prague until Hitler took over Czechoslovakia in 1938, then to Paris. All this time he was active with the main staff of the German SDP, writing for their Neue Vorwaerts and a clandestine paper that was smuggled into Germany. When Hitler took Paris he fled south with Breitscheid [Rudolf]. He survived the period of confusion and is reported to have believed that no French government would violate the traditional French hospitality to political refugees. But Vichy police agents picked them up in Arles, Feb. 1941. They were taken to Paris and turned over to the Gestapo. The end is not established; there are two versions, one that he committed suicide taking poison which he carried with him, the second, execution by the Nazis. He was born August 1877, and thus met his fate in his 64th year. He was a young man when he did his best work:”

The following specific questions occur to me as being important and unanswered: (1) Where was he born? (2) What was the family background; the father’s profession? Where did he go to school and university? Did he study law and economics (if so with whom) or only medicine? How much did he ever practice medicine? How did he happen to get into the socialist movement? What positions did he hold in the Austrian and/or German SPs [Socialist Parties]? in the USPD [Independent Socialist Party Germany]? Is it true that he was the leading architect of the merger between the SPD and the USPD in 1922? Is it true that he was inordinately lazy and fond of good living? Why didn’t he do anything significant after Finanzkapital? Any light you can throw on these or related questions from your own knowledge of the man would be much appreciated. I have finished the part on Boehm-Bawerk, and found it very interesting to write. Shall start on H as soon as possible, so the sooner I can get the dope, the better.²

Hope I shall see you in NY around March 4th.

Yrs,

/s Paul

PAB to PMS

Federal Reserve Bank of New York
February 23, 1949

Dear Paul:

Thanks for returning the issue of the Modern Review. I understand from the Turtle Bay Bookshop that you will be here early in March, and I am looking forward to having a good chat with you. There are many things I would like to talk over with you at this time.

The information on Hilferding summarized in your letter is incomplete and inaccurate. Let me tell you briefly what I think are the most important benchmarks in his career. What follows is not based on any sources but only on my own recollection and ought to be checked as far as details are concerned:

Hilferding was born in Vienna in 1877. He got his training in medicine but never practiced it. Around 1906 or 1907 he became editor of the Neue Zeit and very early thereafter political editor of the Vorwaerts. He became a German citizen sometime before the First World War and was elected to the Reichstag, where he was one of the leading members of the Social-Democratic caucus. In 1914 he voted with the Left Wing against war appropriations and was prominent as a pacifist. In general, one might say that he was not so much a left winger in his political views as a pacifist by inclination or moral conviction. It is this pacifism of his, which at some point coincided with the position taken by the Left, which misled many people into booking him and for that matter many other liberal politicians as Leftists. An interesting parallel is this country where “interventionists” or anti-isolationists came to be regarded as “progressives.” He actually was always, fundamentally, a Right Wing man and his Leftism, if any, consisted on one hand in pacifism and on the other of certain amounts of Marxian orthodoxy in economic theory. When the pacifist issue became less relevant, and the Marxian orthodoxy in economic matters merged in his mind with economic liberalism, he went back where he all the time belonged, namely, to the Right Wing of the Social Democratic Party.

It was his negative attitude towards the war as well as his reluctance to accept the flat empiricism of the Bernstein-revisionist group, that made him one of the leaders of the USP [Independent Socialist Party]. In that capacity, he was editor-in-chief of their newspaper, “Freiheit.” He was bitterly opposed to the twenty-one conditions and after “Halle,” he became one of the leading protagonists of the merger of the SP and the USP.³ Once back in the mother party, he became very soon one of the most outspoken Right Wing theorists strongly supporting the advocates of coalition governments and the Fritz Tarnow wing of the trade union movement. He was Minister of Finance first in 1923; flopped, however, completely in an effort to do something about inflation. He became Minister of Finance again in 1928 and flopped equally badly in trying to do something about the impending depression. In both situations, his economics which in his mind transformed itself by that time into an outright laissez faire theory prevented him from understanding the sort of problems which he had to face in the real world.

In his later days, he became more and more addicted to his notions of “economic democracy” which he somehow considered to be an automatic process calling for very little political action.

As far as your specific questions are concerned: As I said before, he was born in Vienna; as to the family background and father’s occupation, I do not know anything. He did not study economics in any organized fashion but seems to have been working in that field much more than in the field of his formal training, namely, medicine. In both the Austrian and the German SP, he was a high functionary, being member of the Central Committees of both parties. He was inordinately lazy and found it extremely difficult to write and had hardly written anything in the last ten or fifteen years of his life. He did occasionally contribute an article to his own magazine, “Gesellschaft,”⁴ wrote also from time to time in newspapers, but fundamentally gave up research and writing since he got into “big” politics. He was fond of good living, enjoyed very much consorting with those in power, but was so far as I know, scrupulously honest and completely immune to any kind of corruption. His corruption, such as it was, was ideological and “social” rather than of the sordid variety of accepting outright briberies.

His political judgment was actually very poor. His basic indolence and fear of “antagonizing the enemy” led him to accept “doing nothing” as the best policy recommendation. I remember distinctly having spoken to him a few days after Hitler was appointed Chancellor and asking him whether he thought the time was ripe for the unions to call a general strike. Even then, in the first days of February 1933, he was sitting in a comfortable easy chair with warm felt slippers on his feet and remarked with a benign smile that I was a young firebrand and that political skill consists of waiting for the right moment. After all, he said, Hindenburg is still the President, the government is a coalition government and while Hitlers come and go, ADGB [Allgemeine Deutsche Gewerkschafts Bund] is an organization that should not risk its entire existence for a fleeting political purpose.

It was only a few days later that he was hiding at some friend’s house being already sought by the Gestapo.

All the weaknesses of a liberal in politics were accompanied in his case with all the venerable characteristics of a liberal in private life. He was extremely intelligent, tolerant of conflicting views, undogmatic to the point of helping and furthering people who were distinctly his adversaries in political and theoretical matters, critical to an extent that held barely any definite views, and at the same time full of understanding and brilliant flashes. He was not a great man in the field which he had chosen because he was mainly a weak man. If by some stroke of fortune, he would have chosen medicine as his main occupation, he would have become most likely a great physician and humanitarian. Instead, he became a political utopian, a cowardly petty bourgeois who through his entire active life most likely has cancelled out all that he had contributed through the very short stretch of his imaginative creative work.

This is about all I can say at this point. I do not know how useful it will be to you. As far as other more specific data are concerned, they can be secured, I imagine, through some library work, and as far as the last phase of his career goes, it will still have to be some eyewitness who could contribute the needed information.

I am looking forward to seeing you. Give my best regards to Nancy.

Yours as always,

/s Paul

[1950]

PAB to PMS and Leo Huberman (PMS’s co-editor at Monthly Review)

Stanford University
March 28, 1950

Dear Paul and Leo:

[ . . . ]

I was very anxious to shuttle over to NY for the current inter-quarter vacation (10 days), but no money. My general frame of mind is lousy, and I wonder how long I should hang around here. My mother has died in Moscow — my father remained all by himself, I can’t get there, he can’t get permission to get out — it is frightfully difficult to control oneself, not to join the “baiters” and to call those butchers the names that they deserve. On what grounds of responsible reasoning could they justify not permitting a 65 year-old sick man to join his only son? On what grounds of responsible attitude to human lives could they refuse to permit me to visit for 10 days my dying mother? This brutality is not even a means to an end. It is a means without any conceivable purpose — sheer contempt for human existence, sheer soullessness of power-drunk soldatesca [bands of soldiers], sheer weight of a heavy sergeant’s boot. How should one think straight on days like these, how does one not lose one’s equilibrium, one’s ability to see forests, when one is hit over the head with a tree? It takes all that one has not to become desperate. . . .

So much for today. I shall send that thing before the week is over.

Best regards,

/s Paul

PMS to PAB

Wilton, N.H.
March 31, 1950

Dear Paul,

I was very sorry to hear of your mother’s death, and I can certainly understand your bitterness. At the same time, I think you have to make a distinction between their not letting you go to Moscow and their not letting your father come out. If there is justification for an “iron curtain” at all — and I think there is — then there is justification for not allowing Americans in, even on compassionate grounds. The reason, of course, is not in the individual case but in the fact that there are literally hundreds of thousands of Americans with close relations behind the curtain. If they were to be admitted on compassionate grounds, the curtain would be turned into a sieve, and you can be certain that not only individuals with relatives would take advantage of the fact. I don’t see how this logic can be refuted. The case of your father seems to me different, however. He is old and unwell enough so that I assume they could not materially benefit from holding him, and I assume too that he has no special knowledge which would be advantageous to a potential enemy. The only reason I can think of is that there are probably hundreds of thousands of Russians who would like to get out of the country, and their discontent would probably be increased by everyone actually released. This is certainly not an argument that could be ignored, but it seems to me much less persuasive than the reason for not allowing Americans in. But, of course, you are right that they don’t consider the problem from the point of view of simple human relations, and they may be acting simply out of callousness. It is a terrible thing, and one which I believe the socialist movement must find ways of fighting against, but God knows it is not hard to explain. They are still in power at all only because they have learned — ever since the attempt on Lenin’s life, I would say — to be supremely callous, and that sort of thing is bound to extend far beyond the strict limits of necessity.

I know what you mean by feeling sometimes like joining the baiters. The reasons are not only in the SU [Soviet Union] either. Communists everywhere are very difficult to take: fanatics always are, I suppose. But one is always successfully — and in my case easily — restrained by one look at the baiters. The only real alternative course seems to me to withdraw completely into as private a life as possible. That seems to suit some people, but I’m afraid it never would me. The real index of the world crisis is the way it reaches deeply into the personal life of almost everyone. I have a feeling that it has never been so to quite the same extent in earlier transition periods.

[ . . . ]

Nancy joins in sending our sympathy and warmest regards,

As always,

/s Paul

[1951]

PAB to PMS

Stanford University
July 15, 1951

Dear Paul,

[ . . . ]

During this interlude left to me by the planning business I am trying to finish a paper that I started [a] long time ago, and that has been occupying me quite a lot. Tentative title: The Concept and the Significance of Economic Surplus.⁵ You know what I have in mind: every social structure produces a certain amount of what one might call “economic surplus,” (i.e. every more or le...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Introduction
• Editors’ Note on the Text
• 1. The Early Postwar Years, 1949–1952
• 2. The Cold War Years to 1956
• 3. A New Left Critique
• 4. The Search for a Method
• 5. The Magnum Opus and the Cuban Revolution
• 6. The Kennedy Years: Civilian Government Spending
• 7. Inflation, Imperialism, and the Cuban Missile Crisis
• 8. Here Is Rhodes; Jump Here!
• 9. The Last Struggles
• Chronology
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Glossary of Names
• Index