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Baran & Sweezy versus Marx

Daum, Walter
http://insurgentnotes.com/2018/05/baran-sweezy-versus-marx/

Publisher:  Insurgent Notes
Date Written:  20/05/2018
Year Published:  2018  
Resource Type:  Article

In response to the editors' question 'Where was Marx in 1968?," Daum chooses to comment briefly on one topic: the anti-Marxist influence of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s book Monopoly Capital.

Abstract: 

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Excerpts:

I came into the radical and socialist left in the late 1960s, when Monopoly Capital was all the rage in the us New Left. Baran, Sweezy and their Monthly Review tendency deserved recognition for emphasizing the importance of imperialism in sustaining capitalism for a century or more. But their overall theoretical and political influence was harmful.

Those of us trying to grasp Marxism back then and to apply it to the explosive world we were living in-in the United States, the Black struggle and the country’s imperialist assaults on Vietnam, Cuba etc.-were up against slews of Baran-Sweezy fans who learned from their bible that

a.the law of value, and therefore Marxist political economy, was useless for understanding the imperialist world and
b.that the working class in the imperialist countries was useless for challenging capitalism.

The main alternative analysis was the book Marx and Keynes by Paul Mattick, but that was terribly difficult to read and never became popular.

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