Paul M. Sweezy (1910–2004)

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 show more 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. show less

Read for my Marxian Economics class.

While I understand it makes reading Das Kapital a little easier it was also written in the 30's-40's and even though Marx wrote Das Kapital in the 1800's Marx can be easier to understand. It wasn't bad and there was a lot that was informative and explained many topics Marx addresses, but some of what Sweezy writes I just don't really understand.

This is the first of the series of four collections of essays in which Paul M. Sweezy and Harry Magdoff, the editors of Monthly Review, chronicled, as it was taking place, the development of U.S. and global capitalism from the end of its "golden age" in the late 1960s to the full onset of the financial explosion of the early 1990s and after. With exceptional clarity, the authors explain basic economic principles and bring them to life with concrete examples drawn from the daily workings of show more the corporations and the financial markets, and the international monetary system. show less

1942 Classic of Marxist economic theory by the Monthly Review founder. Must-read for understanding capitalism.
It summarizes the economic ideas of Marx and his followers. It was the first book in English that dealt with certain questions thoroughly such as the transformation problem: the problem of finding a general rule to transform the "values" of commodities into the "competitive prices" of the marketplace.