by DOUG DOWD
In 1949, Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman created Monthly Review. In the same year, Paul Baran and I began to teach in the San Francisco Bay Area: Baran at Stanford, myself at UC Berkeley. As the years unfolded, we worked together politically in the area with the same social aims and values. Meanwhile, the two Pauls also began to work together, despite the long distance between them. Then, in the 1960s, while teaching at Cornell University in New York, I, too, began to work with MR. The strongest relationship among all of these was that between Baran and Sweezy, and whatever I meant to them was little compared with what they meant to me. Most who read this will be familiar with their social critiques; what follows will be mostly personal memories, intended to acquaint you a bit with their personalities as experienced by me in the years when I was lucky to work with both of them.
* * *
I first met Baran at the 1950 meeting of the American Economic Association. He was one of several professors giving papers on what were then called “backward areas.” The theme of all except Baran was to “blame the victims” for their misery. In contrast, Baran strongly insisted that it is precisely the relationships between the poor and the rich of the world that keep both in their conditions. As the meeting closed I introduced myself, made a few left-leaning comments, and asked Baran if he would be interested in giving a talk at UC Berkeley. He was, and that was the beginning of what became many joint talks in the Bay Area.
Baran’s paper at the 1950 meeting became two papers soon after: “On the Political Economy of Backwardness” (1952) and “Economic Progress and Economic Surplus” (1953). They then became the analytical core of his first book, The Political Economy of Growth (1957), and the basis for Baran’s contribution to his and Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital (1966).
Monthly Review Zine for more