Paul Sweezy wrote: >"The publication in 1952 of Stalin’s "Economic Problems of Socialism" in the USSR would make possible today a more satisfactory reply.…In the light of [Stalin’s] explanation…I would like to amend the statement which Mr. Kazahaya criticizes.…[The amended statement] conveys my meaning more accurately than the original wording and is, I think entirely in accord with Stalin’s view." (Paul Sweezy (1953), The Present as History (New York: Monthly Review Press), p. 352.)
It is a very interesting person who lets himself be corrected on matters of technical economic theory by Josef Stalin. It is also a very interesting person who writes--in the 1950s, for God's sake!--that the "political leadership in the Soviet Union is acting as the agent of the working class.... [T]he working class is the ruling class in the Soviet Union," and that there is "more genuine democracy in the economic and social spheres in the Soviet Union than anywhere else in the world." If you want to pretend that Sweezy wasn't at times an apologist for the Soviet Union and a stooge for Stalin, go right ahead--it's a free country. But don't expect anybody to ever take you seriously. Yours, Brad DeLong
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