An interview with Harry Magdoff (From MR, May 1999)
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
The following interview was conducted by Christopher Phelps
in
YOUTHFUL RADICALISM
Q: I thought I'd begin, Harry, by being a little unfair to
you and reading from an old piece of yours.
MAGDOFF: That's a terrible thing to do!
Q: See if you can guess when this was written: "Very
often, particularly in the classroom, imperialism is defined as the policy of a
government aimed at conquering or controlling foreign territories. . . . In its
attempt to be all-inclusive, to take in all attempts at foreign conquest, this
definition excludes the key to the understanding of each. It covers everything
but explains nothing. There is a difference between the colonial annexation by
highly developed monopoly capitalism searching for markets and raw materials,
and the colonial projects of slaveholding
MAGDOFF: That's from The Age of Imperialism, isn't it?
Q: That's from the Student Review in 1932.
MAGDOFF: No!
Q: Absolutely. Sounds like Monthly Review, doesn't it?
MAGDOFF: I just can't believe it. I thought it was from the
book.
Q: So the germs of your thought were present way back then.
How did you become a radical? I take it your parents were not, particularly.
MAGDOFF: No, they weren't, but I lived in an environment
where radicalism was not strange. When the Russian Revolution took place - the
first revolution, the Kerensky revolution - the
family had relatives on the
Secondly, the
So the idea of war and revolution was all part of my
experience in the immigrant community.
Q: Then, at
MAGDOFF: No, I was already radical. I had read a lot of Marx
by the time I got to
The popular notion about students in the twenties was that
they drank the hard stuff to excess and wore raccoon coats. By accident, I
landed in the high school English class from which the editors of the following
year's school newspaper were to be chosen. Among our assignments was to write
an editorial. I wrote one contrasting student riots over social issues in
I think the determining element in my radicalization was the
demonstration of the unemployed in Union square in March 1930. The fact that I
went there shows an inclination, an interest. The experience, however, was
overwhelming. The square was mobbed, crowded with gaunt-faced people, dressed
as you might expect people in poverty to dress. They listened quietly to the
speeches, applauding and shouting from time to time. Then a speaker roused the
crowd to a high pitch and urged that all march down to City Hall. As the crowd
began to move, mounted police appeared. With billy
clubs, they beat anyone within reach ruthlessly on heads, arms, shoulders. Blood splattered. I ran like hell.
Q: What were the circumstances of your expulsion from
MAGDOFF: Well, in the early thirties, the change among
students was startling and sudden, not a revolution but a transformation, a
rapid growth of student political activity. That was where my politics grew. As
I remember, those of us in the Social Problems Club at
Q: Ah, the carefree days of youth.
MAGDOFF: That's right. What happened was, you were supposed
to get approval to have a publication, we didn't, and they suspended the club.
We checked, and we found that the Democratic Party club had a paper, and they
never got the formal approval of it. We complained, but that did nothing. So a
group of us got together, I think at my house, and we wrote a leaflet telling
what had happened and protesting it. I headed the leaflet, "Stop Whistling
in the Dark." I used the idiomatic expression incorrectly, but it was
appropriate for getting people's attention! We distributed it at the subway and
at the school. That was a violation, and we were then suspended.
We could only gather again, after a period, with a faculty
advisor. None of the teachers we approached wanted to be faculty advisor,
partly because it was a nuisance, but more likely because they did not want to
displease the bureaucratic college administration. Finally, somebody in our
gang said, "why don't we ask Morris Cohen?" Morris Raphael Cohen, the
philosopher, was God to most of us. Some of our group went to him and he said
yes, on one condition: that the meetings be held in
his presence at his room during his lunch period. This room had many glass
bookcases filled with medieval documents, it seemed to me. His desk was on a
small platform. He sat and ate his sandwiches while we had our meetings. His
sandwich came in a brown bag with grease spots, just like my mother's, the same
kind of sandwich: an omelette or something like that in a roll. He would slowly chew on a Mallomars cookie. I can still visualize it. We stood, we
talked, we discussed affairs of the world - and he'd never open his mouth. He
sat as if he was listening to what we were saying. He never read but seemed to
pay strict attention to momentous debate, which he probably disagreed with. It
was an impressive experience, and of course consistent with his firm belief in
the freedom of speech.
Now, I don't remember all the events that led to our
expulsion. At some point the administration did something we thought so unjust
and arbitrary that we wanted to rouse public attention and, of course, public
support. We rented a big hall and conducted a trial of the
Q: I see. And then you went to NYU?
MAGDOFF: I wasn't going to go any place, but my mother was
very unhappy. She had never been to school, taught herself to read, was highly
intelligent, and had an inordinate respect for education. Over the years, she
had squirreled away some housekeeping money, enough to pay for a semester at
NYU.
NEW DEAL DAYS
Q: In the late 1930s and early 1940s, you held a number of
positions in various agencies in
MAGDOFF: No. You have to understand, in the thirties,
getting a job was a great achievement. The lines were long for taking civil
service jobs - as post office workers, statistical clerks, et cetera. If a
Marxist got a job with a government agency, he was a lucky stiff. He was the
one who paid for the coffee. When I got a job with the National Research
Project, it meant a decent wage and, mirabile dictu, a challenging problem to solve. You sat in an office
supplied with research materials and were paid every week to sit and think
about why there was so much unemployment. Who needed heaven?
Not all the jobs in the government were the same, of course.
It was a capitalist, imperialist government. Being part of a police force that
broke up picket lines or stood by the roadside watching a Negro being lynched,
or being a marine who helped keep "order" in
Q: Tell me about the kinds of things you worked on in the
New Deal years.
MAGDOFF: Well, my first job was to design and construct
measures of labor productivity. This was in 1936, when the government had been
spending large sums on public works, outright relief, and WPA jobs.
Needless to say, the labor theory of value is another
matter. What interested me on this occasion was that contrary to the standard
practice of the economics profession, labor time can be a logical and useful
measure. When I wrote this up in an article for the Journal of the American
Statistical Association in 1939, I concluded by pointing out that if the
purpose of studying productivity was not unemployment but to ascertain how much
a given labor force could produce to meet the needs of the people, then the
design of the productivity index would be very different. I was so pleased with
myself to have introduced a socialist idea in a stodgy, technical journal! I
doubt that more than five or six readers recognized what I was getting at.
I never got the chance to test productivity measures in a
socialist-directed society, but I did get involved in central planning
regarding machinery for metalworking plants, a critical bottleneck in military
production shortly after the United States entered the Second World War. To the
extent that there was a half-assed attempt at planning, it was concerned with
supposed equity between different branches of the military. But this
bureaucratic approach prevented the airplane factories from getting rolling,
because even though they had plenty of Type A machine tools they lacked Type B.
On the other hand, there were tank factories with a reverse imbalance. As a
result of some work I had done on metalworking machinery factories, I was
called in to try to find a way to coordinate the supplies and production. To
get the program underway, I felt that consensus rather than force of law was
the way to go. Interestingly enough, the manufacturers, the clerical workers,
who had to supply information fast, and the War Production Board officials
created few obstacles once they understood our aims. The only serious friction
came from representatives of the military services. I remember to this day the
fairly high-ranking naval officer who couldn't understand the need for
coordinated planning and bitterly complained, "But doesn't water seek its
own level?" This is not too different from the cries we hear half a
century later from so-called market socialists, with their varying degrees of
faith in the efficiency and equity of a market allocation of resources.
WHEN COLD WINDS BLEW
Q: Given all that you've said, the postwar period,
especially 1948 onward, must have been devastating.
MAGDOFF: It was very hard for us. We had nothing - no
reserves - and two children. Beadie got a job
teaching, part-time at first, then full-time. They badly needed teachers of the
retarded. I had work, but always a little of this, a little of that. Nothing certain, nothing sure. Finally, I got a job for $75
a week and came home with a box of candy. It was a big deal.
The job was the craziest kind of thing: sales promotion
manager for a television company that produced programs. I asked the boss,
"How come?" He knew about my being hounded politically. He said,
"I could get you cheap." Then, when I went on Wall Street, I told the
boss that there had been a lead story on the New York Times front page about me
at one point, and he might be visited by the FBI. He said, "I don't care,
as long as you can make money for me."
I hated Wall Street. I just hated it.
Q: Why doesn't that surprise me?
MAGDOFF: Finally, I had to solve an insurance problem for
somebody, and I was able to solve it. The insurance people were impressed, so
they asked me to come to work for them as an insurance broker. Well, that at
least was a more honorable job to me. People needed insurance. I didn't care
for it, but at least I was doing something useful.
We managed, and we also had an interesting life. We met new
and interesting people - Leo Huberman, Paul Sweezy, Paul Baran, Stanley
Moore, Hube Wilson, Carl Marzani,
Annette Rubinstein - with
whom we became the best of friends. There were also, meanwhile, grand juries
and lawyers, and a lot of tension involved. Newspaper
stories. The kids were involved. Beadie was
called down to the Board of Education. We didn't have what some of the radicals
had: the backing of an organization. Going to the committees and the juries
alone is a very tough thing, and people who had a party affiliation of some
sort had a support group. We had friends, and also the family, who didn't
necessarily agree but were supportive.
Our fortunes changed with Russell & Russell. The company
was facing severe financial constraints, and the owner came to me for advice,
and I said, "You need money." I put a little money in which came from
my work on Wall Street. That's what made me independent. As soon as I could, I
quit. Atheneum bought us up. So in about eight years,
we went from poverty to a modest level of independence. And I wouldn't have
done it if it hadn't have been for the goddamned committees.
Q: Were you reading Monthly Review from the beginning?
MAGDOFF: Oh, from the very first issue. I found it on a
newsstand on 42nd Street near the library. I couldn't afford a subscription,
but every month I would go to 42nd Street. The proprietor had very thick
glasses, and on his stand was everything from all over the world, and
everything political. You'd meet CPers, Trotskyists, anarchists, Zionists, and plenty of nice
eccentrics. There were always people around that you could talk with. That's
where I'd get my Monthly Review. I fell in love with it for three reasons: it
talked about socialism, a taboo topic at the time; it declared itself
independent, beyond the control of any party; and the language was clear and
simple. These things gave it a quality that was altogether different.
IMPERIALISM AND UNDERDEVELOPMENT
Q: One of the distinguishing characteristics of the
magazine, and your work in particular, has been the economic analysis of
imperialism. How would you say that the position of you and others in the MR
group - Baran, Andre Gunder
Frank, Samir Amin, and so
forth - on imperialism and underdevelopment differed if at all substantially
from the socialist analysis of imperialism earlier in the century?
MAGDOFF: It would be hard for me to answer that. The
distinguishing thing, it seems to me, in terms of imperialism was that our
position was without a sort of arrogance of the left. Among Marxists, party
people, and so on - and I don't just mean CP but Trotskyists
and so on - there was always a feeling that "we know best," you see.
The position of MR was a closer identity psychologically, a way of thinking,
with the third world. I don't know whether it was a question of anybody
influencing anybody else, but we came together a lot because we thought the
same way. It's not that we were better, but that it was high up on our thinking
and our agenda, to this day.
Q: How do you think the particular propositions of the MR
school stand up? In particular, I'm wondering about the argument that
development in the third world was systematically stymied.
MAGDOFF: Industrial development? You are justified in
raising that point, but I don't think that was what was most important about
the MR position. If anything, the most important part was that development in
the periphery was, as Gunder Frank put it, the
development of underdevelopment.
Our thesis was that it was in the interest of the first
world, of the capitalist centers, to have the colonies or semi-colonial areas
as preserves to make profit. If profit could be made by putting a factory
there, you did it that way. If profit was to be made by controlling
agriculture, you did it that way. You then got in the third world a comprador
group who benefitted from their connection to the
first world, and who kept development from taking place, especially in
agriculture. You did not have an independent bourgeois class that was ready to
make a revolution or do whatever was necessary to become the ascendant class in
society. The ruling class was usually a combination of different elite groups.
The landlords played a very important role, as did the comprador capitalists.
So the class composition of these countries worked against development.
In my articles later issued as The Age of Imperialism, I
showed how aid and debt creation created persistent balance of payments
problems and debt peonage. These, together with currency devaluation, which The
Age of Imperialism also explained, are strategic factors in the current
economic crisis in
ENGAGING WITH THE THIRD WORLD
Q: People use the phrase "third worldism"
to describe the politics of MR. One thing that is sometimes said on the left
about the magazine is that it neglected class struggles within the imperialist
centers - within the United States, for example - in the misplaced belief that
struggles in the periphery were going to eventually solve the revolutionary
problem. Actually, in rereading the magazine, I don't think that criticism of
the magazine stands up, with a few exceptions. There has always been attention
to labor and internal struggles within the advanced capitalist countries.
MAGDOFF: There's always been. The accusation of "third worldism" comes, I think, from two sources. One is
that much more attention was paid to third world situations and third world
struggles by MR than by any other publication on the left. In other words, you
found out more. There was more space devoted to it. The other is that to us
this is where the struggles were taking place. It wasn't the fact that we knew
what the next step in history was going to be, or that we expected, as some believed,
that the periphery would surround the centers of capitalism. It's just that
this was important, and this is where the struggle actually was.
We did have articles on labor whenever there was something
that we felt was worth publishing. But within the left there were those who
felt that this was third worldism, and they accused
us of saying that everything was in the third world. We felt that we were
reporting what was happening, what we thought was important. The fact is that
there was a
Q: How do you now think about the range of armed struggles
in the third world for which the magazine had enthusiasm? Some now say that the
left rather uncritically invested hope in a whole series of such movements,
hope that turned out to be unwarranted. Things certainly haven't panned out in
quite the way that the magazine wished.
MAGDOFF: I don't think that it is up to the left to judge
whether it is warranted or unwarranted when people are in struggle where there
is tremendous poverty, misery, and little hope, and in the process either make
mistakes, or don't make the best decisions, or are misled by opportunists. It
is a natural phenomenon, to be expected. History does not come easy.
What we are talking about is a process of liberation which
involves not merely a mechanical formula. It involves a way of life, a way of
thinking, and there's a great deal of suffering in the process, problems that
cannot be solved. It's very complex, and you're going to get these kinds of
problems. It's our job to study and to see and to understand what the forces
were. But to judge? It's wrong. Marx at one point says
that there will be many revolutions and wars and defeats before the working
class learns how to be a ruling class. And that's it. History takes a hell of a
lot more work, comes with many more setbacks, than we expect.
Q: What's also meant by "third worldism"
- and this I think you'll agree is true - is that there was a Maoist component
to the editors' thinking.
MAGDOFF: Oh, there was a Maoist component. There's no
question about it. There were things that Mao said that we felt were major
contributions to Marxist theory and to understanding of the problems of the
third world, to this day.
Q: Yet at the same time you opened the pages of the magazine
to people who weren't Maoist at all. For example, Trotskyists
or people who came out of Trotskyist backgrounds:
Isaac Deutscher, Ernest Mandel, Adolfo Gilly, Hal Draper, Grace and James Boggs, and, more
recently, Michael Lowy and Alan Wald.
Nowhere else on the Maoist left would you find that, and rarely on the Trotskyist left.
MAGDOFF: No. I got a letter from a member of the Maoist
party in
I think the point that you're making is a very important
one, and it needs to be recognized. One of the things that attracted me to
Monthly Review from the beginning was its non-sectarian character. I think
sectarianism was inbred in the history of socialism in the
Isaac Deutscher to us was a very
important intellectual, a great man. I didn't agree with him on a number of
things, but he was someone you had to listen to and respect. Mandel,
also. One of the nicest things Mandel ever said to me was when I was
complaining, "Let's not kid ourselves. Our circulation is very
small." "Harry," he says, "Die Neue
Zeit had only thirteen thousand readers!" Well,
of course,
REFLECTIONS ON MAOISM
Q: What do you draw upon in Mao still?
MAGDOFF: To me, the important thing is a different view of
development and socialism, one that puts a very strong emphasis on
consciousness as a factor in overcoming the competitive spirit, which is not
something that will happen overnight. It might even take centuries, but you
have to work towards it. You have to think and be conscious of it.
Also the fact that there's always the tendency toward the
formation of strata and classes, if not in Marx's sense of classes, at least
group interests different from the masses' interests. You have to fight against
that, have constant revolution, be conscious of it and struggle, not accept it
as the firm established state, the one perfect way of doing things.
Then the strong emphasis on the peasantry, and the role of
industry associated with the peasantry: "walking on two legs" as a
principle.
There is also his critique of the notion that the
development of the productive forces is the most important thing - that element
of Soviet development, whether it came from theory, self-interest, or both. Of
course, you've got to develop the productive forces. You go to China, and you
see someone sitting on a roadside chiseling on a piece of stone with a hand
chisel, and you think how many hours and days he's got to do it, when it could
be done so easily. The productive forces are important to lighten the work and
to get more product out of it for the people. But if
you emphasize them to the exclusion of productive relations, then you go away
from socialism. Privileges start to develop.
These, to me, are very important elements of Maoism. Now,
you can find things in Mao, start looking again, analyze his every word, and so
on - but these ideas are strictly important.
Q: I take it, then, that you disagree with the criticisms of
the Cultural Revolution prevalent today?
MAGDOFF: The attempt in
Nothing that you do on a mass scale is not
going to have complications and contradictions. When terrible things
happened, it was the result of doing things before there was preparation and
program. You have to have the institutions for it. It doesn't come by itself.
Now, I'm not defending everything that happened. I'm not saying that disasters
did not occur for one reason or another. But the approach, the thinking, the
ideas are fundamental socialist ideals that apply to the third world and should
be applied to the first world, too, which has not been uppermost in the
thinking of the Communist Parties. In that sense, Mao's words are not a Bible,
but the ideas are fundamentally important. His criticism of the Soviet book on
economics was very important.
Now, you say "politics are in command," and then
you get people who are members of the Communist Party but are no good, and so
you get their politics in command. It's not a question of the Communist Party,
but of the particular individuals that are involved, the particular clique that
happens to develop. That's all part of it, part of the complexities of a
developing society. But the idea of putting politics in command, that it's not
productive forces but productive relations, is democracy - not in the classic
sense, but democracy. One of the big things in the Cultural Revolution was that
people began to talk. They got to speak up against their leaders. It was a new
thing altogether. It failed, for all sorts of reasons. But the idea that you
can speak up is very important.
Q: I see that anti-authoritarianism of the Cultural
Revolution as being very contradictory, because at the same time there was a
tremendous cult of personality around Mao and a great amount of arbitrary
authority in his hands.
MAGDOFF: There's no question that it held them up. I'm not
justifying it, because I really don't know what happened. Some of the Maoists
have explanations of that: that it was not Mao's doing, and so on. I don't know
whether that's so or not. In the turmoil, a revolution was produced. In the
revolution, a lot of evil came out, and various forces that had been repressed
came into conflict with one another, came out into the open. And it didn't
work. There wasn't a preparation for it. But at the same time, there was a
challenge, a challenge to the intellectuals. There were intellectuals who were
tortured, and some of them were badly treated. Some of it was very stupid, very
terrible. It's a big country with a lot of people in it, so many things
happened at the same time. But something fundamental happened,
and I think that the attitude of peasants and intellectuals differed toward the
Cultural Revolution.
So it's not a question of taking a position for or against.
I wouldn't even think in those terms. I think it needs examination, study, to
be seen from different angles. And the positive things in it, I think, are very
strong. Democratic ideas were introduced, even though authoritarianism was in
control. The idea that you can challenge the leaders and question what they
say, even though democracy was suppressed, opened things up for a period.
BLACK LIBERATION AND SOCIALIST FEMINISM
Q: I want to ask you about two features of the sixties
radicalization, black liberation and women's liberation. It's interesting to me
that in both cases, the issue is important to the magazine, yet it's sometimes
hard to chart precisely the magazine's position. For instance, starting with
Oliver Cox, then James Boggs, and more recently writers like Cornel West and
Manning Marable, the magazine has always had
relationships with Marxist black intellectuals.
MAGDOFF: Not enough, in my opinion.
Q: That seems true, too. Still, relationships, which I think
both parties have found valuable. How would you summarize the nature of the
magazine's thinking on the question of black liberation? One of the big divides
in black thought has been between nationalism and integrationism
- at least that was how it was framed in the fifties and sixties. Yet the
magazine's position seems to transcend that. There's support for revolutionary
nationalism in some respects, but an openness to black
and white working hand-in-hand together.
MAGDOFF: That's a good point that you make.
Q: Let me read from a Review of the Month, "The Old
Left and the New," published in the same issue that announced you as
editor, May 1969: "What a distance we've come in a few short years! In
place of the reformist old left which dreamt of uniting whites and blacks under
a single leadership and achieving its aims through pressure politics, we now
have a new left which understands and accepts (1) the necessity of revolution
and (2) that at least for the foreseeable future whites and blacks must
organize separately while struggling together."
MAGDOFF: I think that passage, written by Paul, is
important. That's the difference between Monthly Review and party publications,
and the way party publications operate: "There's only one correct way, and
we know it." What's reflected there is what happened in the struggle
itself.
SNCC itself started out as black and white together. The
black activists found, in terms of their own experience, that they had to have
their own organization. Paul and I in our practical experience, in our
activities, took the same position. The responsibility of whites is to support
the black struggle, not to lead it. Moreover, to respect the wishes of African
Americans on how they wish to organize. Who knows what forms the struggle will
take in the future? But we do know from the past how swiftly whites tend to
dominate, for all sorts of reasons, because of the long history of hierarchy,
educational differences, organizational experience, and a deeply ingrained
sense of being second-class citizens. I think what happened in the striving for
self-direction came from experience in the struggle, not from a preconceived
theoretical position.
I don't remember whether it was covered in "The Old
Left and the New," but to me even cultural challenges were important in
the sixties. It didn't come from us, but they raised questions about bourgeois
culture that were never raised by the left in the past, as such. I don't mean
that at some point in
Q: Now, what about socialist-feminism? I'm curious if you
remember how you got that Margaret Benston article,
"The Political Economy of Women's Liberation," published in September
1969.
MAGDOFF: Oh, I got it. I was up in
Q: Gough wrote frequently for the magazine in the seventies.
MAGDOFF: She was a fighter and a good anti-imperialist. She
wrote a very good article on colonialism, imperialism, and anthropology which
we published in MR. I asked her to come to one of our anniversaries, and she
gave a wonderful speech.
Q: The Benston article had an
extremely wide influence at the time.
MAGDOFF: It had a big influence, yes, though strangely we
were very criticized by people who thought that we didn't write enough about
the women's question. My argument was, "Get us the articles that would be
useful for us." We didn't see ourselves as getting involved in the
detailed criticisms between the various feminists, on levels we didn't
understand. We felt that a lot of it became infighting among intellectuals,
with nothing of substance. But we were ready to, and did, publish pieces. Not
enough, but we welcomed it.
CAPITALISM AND STAGNATION
Q: A hallmark of MR's economic
thought has been the theory that "stagnation is the normal and natural
condition of monopoly capitalism," as you and Paul wrote in "The
Economic Crisis in Historical Perspective" in April 1975. The MR school
seems distinguished from other theorists of stagnation, like Alvin Hansen, by
its emphasis on monopoly as the causal factor. Why is monopoly the cause of
stagnation? And how can the theory account for increasing competitive pressures
since the 1960s from
MAGDOFF: While I share the view that stagnation is the
normal and natural condition of monopoly capitalism, MR has no "party
line" on this issue. Speaking for myself, for example, I do not believe
that the specter of stagnation was absent in earlier stages of capitalism. It
should go without saying that an inner dynamism is an outstanding feature of
capitalism, and that its growth is spurred by new products and technological
advances. In time, however, the stimulus provided by each innovation peters
out. New incentives are needed. But there is no certainty that enough
innovations will come along for new or expanded enterprises to provide jobs for
the growing labor force and for workers displaced by speed-up or new technology.
Without the stimulation of innovation, capital investment, profits, and the
economy as a whole slow down - stagnation. It's the threat of that eventuality
that leads the ruling class to seek special development factors to support
capital accumulation, new markets and new areas in which to invest, for
example. An outstanding factor which counteracted stagnation tendencies from
the earliest days of capitalism was the conquest and penetration of
non-capitalist territories.
Why, then, the argument that stagnation is the normal and
natural condition of the monopoly stage of capitalism? To follow the reasoning
on this point, it is important to see that much more is involved than the
behavior of individual corporations. Monopoly capital is closely associated
with a number of historic changes during the latter part of the nineteenth
century. It is an integral element of what might be described as a climacteric
in the maturation of industrially advanced capitalism.
The 1870s and 1880s witnessed a universal lengthy
stagnation. This was also the time when younger industrial powers reached the
point where they could challenge
Along with this sea change in capitalism, as both cause and
effect, came a major leap in the concentration of capital. The giant
corporations which emerged in those years acquired the ability to control major
shares of their markets. To maintain that control and strive for a larger share
while keeping profits high, they competed in ways different from the
price-cutting of the previous stage, competitive capitalism. The structure and
strategy of these huge concentrations of economic power changed in accordance
with the requirements of the new ways of competing, a focus on protecting their
assets from predators, and the growing importance of finance as a weapon of
defense as well as offense. Thus, instead of investing in internal growth,
which would contribute to overall economic growth, they may devote their
resources to destroy or buy up weaker rival firms. Sometimes, of course, they
take the lead in expanding capacity and creating jobs. But that is only one of
a range of choices, many of which contribute to the onset or prolongation of
stagnation. This can clearly be seen these days in the expanding contribution
of financial operations to the profits of major industrial corporations, and in
the allocation of corporate and banking resources to the mad rush of mergers
and acquisitions on an international scale.
This is all a way of saying that equating monopoly with
stagnation is too simple, in my opinion. One has to see the matter in
historical as well as theoretical perspective - in a perspective that reaches
to the roots of imperialism as well as to today's globalization.
SOCIALISM AND THE MARKET
Q: As you know, Harry, the virtues of the market are no
longer sung by the
MAGDOFF: Yes, I think it is important to distinguish the
market from a market system. The market, as an institution to distribute
consumer goods in a complex society, will no doubt exist for a long time to
come. A market system is, of course, something else. When guided by profit
maximization, the market becomes the allocator of
resources: raw materials, machinery, construction goods. The market system
serves to reproduce the arrived-at allocation of resources and sustains the
prevailing distribution of income. But what is a socialist society for, if not
to radically change the allocation of resources to meet the wishes and needs of
the people?
Even the market function will not necessarily be the same in
all societies. I was intrigued when walking through a
Q: In "A Note on 'Market Socialism,'" in May 1995,
you distinguish national planning from bureaucratic central control. How could
national plans be determined democratically?
MAGDOFF: I don't think there is a necessary and inevitable
connection between central planning and bureaucratic control. A bureaucratic
state will use planning in its own fashion. But a democratic socialist
government can and must have democratic planning if it is to remain a democracy
and move toward socialism. Allocation of major resources for social use does
not require national control of every detail of production. A great deal of
decision-making could be delegated to regions and localities, with the national
central planners acting as coordinators; the people could be provided with
information and analyses needed to participate in making planning choices.
But I don't believe any of us can do much more than propose
principles. I think it would be the height of arrogance for intellectuals to
think they can design concretely a workable system for a people to adopt. To
get concrete would be to prejudge history. So much depends on what country we
are talking about. The
Actually, the challenges of a transformation of
consciousness, and socialist culture in general, get pitifully little attention
in socialist circles. Instead the focus is on democracy, usually democracy as
an abstract ideal, without regard to social relations, abolition of classes, or
the road to equality. There are tough questions about what socialist democracy
might mean. Take, for example, what many of us believe should be an outstanding
feature of replacing capitalism: giving top priority to empowering and meeting
the basic needs of the most impoverished and oppressed sectors of the
population. That would require major changes in the allocation of resources,
the kind of changes which a market system, even one where the factories are
managed by the workers, cannot hope to achieve.
If we are serious about working for a democratic socialism,
we would do well to clarify what we mean by democracy. We know what is wrong
with democracy when there are vast class differences in power and wealth. But
differences among the people will likely exist for a long time after capitalism
is transcended. Consider, for example, giving priority to the needs of the most
oppressed. That could mean putting off remedies for a large sector of the
population, and even cutting into the living standards of the more privileged.
It might mean developing the resources of some regions of the country to the
disadvantage of other regions. I don't pretend to have the answers, but these
are some of the questions that come to mind when I come across the facile solutions
that some of our friends propose, whether market socialists or central planning
advocates with a new gimmick.
WORK AND HOPE
Q: You've been an editor of MR for thirty years now. Tell me
about you and Paul, and how you have functioned together.
MAGDOFF: Well, it was just as natural as it could be. Either
one of us would come up with an idea for the Review of the Month, and we'd talk
it over and come to some decision, and one of us would take it. We would have
comments on each other's, but very minor comments. The understanding was, as
with Leo, that we could each have our own Reviews of the Month. And they did:
on
When Paul asked me to join him, he said, "You won't
have to do anything." I had been away from things for many years. I was
hoping when I got free from work that I would be able to study, to catch up,
read, do some research. And Paul said, "All you'll have to do is give me
your judgment on the articles, and I'll do all the writing." A short time
afterward, I said, "Remember what you said?" I'd been writing all
these Reviews of the Month. He said, "You didn't believe me, did
you?"
Q: Reading the early issues, it surprises me how early in
the magazine's life there were appeals to potential authors for brevity and
clarity.
MAGDOFF: That has been, I think, a distinguishing feature of
MR. Paul is very strong on that. Leo was more so. Leo was very critical of Paul:
"Talk to workers. You have to explain things." I mean critical in a
friendly way: "Revise it. You have to rewrite it. I don't
understand." Well, I haven't done that with Paul, not that you need to do
it much. He used to do it to mine. It made all the difference in the world. A
word here, a change there - the whole thing took on different form. It was very
helpful. He has been a real friend, in every sense of the word.
Q: In a 1982 essay on Edward Bellamy and other social
critics, "The Meaning of Work," you argue against the bourgeois view
of work as a burden to be avoided and for seeing work as a creative activity
central to human existence. It occurs to me that this spirit may help explain
the extraordinary late-life productivity of both you and Paul, who have
continued to write, speak, lead, and edit long after most Americans retire.
MAGDOFF: I suspect what you call our late-life productivity
may have more to do with the competence of our doctors! It's true that being
actively involved in the good cause gives zest to life, and I feel myself
fortunate in having Monthly Review as the focus of my activity. But I must
admit that there is frustration, too, in having so little time to study and
write about developments in the present global disorder, much of which we
foretold over the years. The frustration, alas, comes from the pressure of
administrative affairs, particularly efforts to get around the financial
shoals. It would be so nice if Paul and I - Ellen, too, of course - could
devote full time to study and write for the spread of the Marxist socialist
project.
Q: What keeps you going?
MAGDOFF: It's my life. I never expected a socialist
Every summer the
I said, "I don't know. I don't expect anything
particular. But this is the way I am. I can't be any other way. I have to
believe that there can be a better world."