[URPE] Harry Magdoff, 1913-2006

Harry Magdoff, 1913-2006

Harry Magdoff, co-editor of Monthly Review since 1969
and one of the world's leading political economists,
died on New Year's Day, 2006 at his home in Vermont. He
kept the journal to the socialist principles and
theoretical and pedagogical standards of its late
founders, Paul M. Sweezy, who died in February 2004,
and Leo Huberman.

A capsule biography from MR, May 1999, by Christopher
Phelps:

The twentieth anniversary issue of Monthly Review in
May 1969 carried the announcement that Harry Magdoff -
the independent economist - had officially joined Paul
Sweezy as co-editor, replacing Leo Huberman, who had
died in 1968.

Born in 1913 in the Bronx, son of a house painter,
Magdoff attended the City College of New York where he
became a member of the Social Problems Club and editor
of Frontiers, the club's monthly periodical. In 1932,
he traveled to Chicago to attend the founding
conventions of the National Students League and the
Youth League Against War and Fascism.

On that trip, he married fellow New York student
Beatrice Greizer (familiarly known as Beadie, to whom
he has been married ever since). He was editor of the
NSL's national publication Student Review in 1932-1933.
After being expelled from City College for his
activism, he attended New York University, receiving a
B.S. in economics in 1936.

He accepted a position in Philadelphia with the Works
Progress Administration's national research project,
for which he conducted studies of the labor force,
unemployment, industrial capacity, and productivity. In
1940, he moved to Washington, D.C., to take charge of
the civilian requirements division of the National
Defense Advisory Commission.

After U.S. entry into the Second World War in 1941, he
served with the War Production Board. Near the end of
the war, he was the chief economist in charge of the
Current Business Analysis Division at the Department of
Commerce, where he oversaw the Survey of Current
Business. He spent his final years in government as
special assistant to Secretary of Commerce Henry
Wallace.

In 1948, he was summoned before the House Committee on
Un-American Activities. Unemployed, he returned to New
York, where he took various jobs, sometimes
anonymously, in financial analysis and insurance before
joining the staff of Russell & Russell, a publisher of
scholarly out-of- print books, between 1959 and 1965.

Magdoff returned to the fore as a public Marxist
intellectual with "Problems of United States
Capitalism," an essay in The Socialist Register 1965,
edited by Ralph Miliband and John Saville (London:
Merlin Press). Widely recognized for his economic
analysis of imperialism, Magdoff is author of The Age
of Imperialism (1969) and Imperialism: From the
Colonial Age to the Present (1977), and co-author with
Paul Sweezy of The Dynamics of U.S. Capitalism (1970),
The End of Prosperity (1977), The Deepening Crisis of
U.S. Capitalism (1980), Stagnation and the Financial
Explosion (1987), and The Irreversible Crisis (1988),
all from Monthly Review Press.

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Received on 03-01-06