Sweezy, Paul Marlor

Born Apr. 10, 1910, in New York City. American economist and journalist.

In 1931, Sweezy graduated from Harvard University, where he also received a Ph.D. in 1937. He taught economics and political economy at Harvard (1934–46), Cornell (1959–60), and Stanford (1961) universities and the New School for Social Research (1964). He is the founder and publisher of the magazine Monthly Review (since 1949), for which he regularly writes articles on current political-economic and historical-economic issues. In a number of works, Sweezy has set forth the principal propositions of the economic theory of K. Marx, so that in bourgeois circles he is regarded as a propagandist of Marxism. However, Sweezy is not a Marxist. For example, in Monopoly Capital (1966), coauthored with P. A. Baran, Sweezy, while stressing the parasitic, decaying character of present-day monopoly capitalism, at the same time propagandizes revisionist ideas of the transformation of bourgeois society, in which shifts of a socialist character supposedly occur.

As an adherent of the vulgar theory of “economic stagnation,” Sweezy has attributed the decline in the growth rate of the American economy to the achievement by the USA of economic “maturity,” which was inevitably followed by a period of “natural” stagnation. He defends the idea of active government intervention in the economy and the introduction of planning to overcome the economic contradictions of present-day capitalism.