Paul Sweezy was a great teacher with an open and inventive mind, the
very example of a lucid and courageous militant life. A friend.
Paul Sweezy was one of those marxists for whom marxism did not stop at
Marx but started from him. In Vol. II of Das Kapital, by putting to
work the key concept that total output comprises two productive
sectors--investment goods ("Department I") and consumption
goods ("Department II")--Marx began the undertaking of a rigorous
analysis of the process of capital accumulation. He shone a light on
the contradictions within the system forced by the class struggle,
whose effects are expressed through inconsistencies in the
dynamics of expanded reproduction. Marx thus offered a
framework for analysis of the uneven development of
global capitalism.
In the years after Marx's death, these leads to continue the working out
of the theoretical understanding of really existing capitalism gave rise
to inventive critical conceptual work from Rosa Luxemburg, Franz
Bortkiewicz, and those analysts of imperialism on whom Lenin
based his own analysis. But later, the simplistic dogmatism imposed
in the Third International was to call a halt to the necessary task
of tirelessly continuing the work of Marx. Paul Sweezy is to be found
among those exceptional thinkers who rejected that false discipline.
That fact made him one of the main precursors of future social
thought and renewal of marxism. By his analysis of the problem
of absorption of surplus-product he began a necessary renewal
of the theory of contemporary monopoly capitalism. Above and
beyond that, by linking this analysis closely to that of imperialism
he placed the whole theory of capitalism squarely within its
real global dimensions.
Paul Sweezy was a clear-sighted and brave militant. None better than
he to make the whole world understand both the true nature of the
American ruling class's imperialist program and those specific features
of its political culture which, ever since its birth and the conquest
of its West, have shaped that ruling class's mental outlook. Such
a work of unsparing critique required untamable courage like
that which Paul Sweezy demonstrated in McCarthyite times.
The best tribute we can pay to his memory is to continue
his brave and clear-sighted work with the same courage
and lucidity.
