People's Democracy

TO many of the present generation, the name of Harry Magdoff may not resonate or sound a bell, but to the generation which came to adulthood in the years of the Second World War, with a childhood passed in the tumultuous and churning years of the Great Depression, the heartrending but little understood Spanish Civil War, the rise and triumph of Fascism, ending with the loss of its joyous youthful years on the battlefields and amid the bombings of the Second World War, three names among others – Paul Sweezy, Leo Huberman, and later Harry Magdoff – stood out helping us to understand and recognise that the world had changed. New features and structures were emerging in the post-war situation. Imperialism had donned a new face, leading to a new stage and forms of struggle in the colonial and ex-colonial countries, alternately termed as undeveloped, underdeveloped and developing. In short, structural adjustments that had taken place in the changed world correlation of class forces, amongst others, the decline in British imperialist power, the leadership passing over to American imperialism, and the emergence of the Soviet Union as the second most world power.

In 1949, a new magazine, Monthly Review, made its appearance, edited by Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman. It was a new kind of magazine, non-party, Left, different from the Labour Monthly, for while it gave economic and political analysis of developments in the capitalist world, it concentrated on the situation and struggles in the ‘Third World’, a term first introduced by the Chinese Party, but very quickly adopted in political and intellectual circles. We waited for it every month and read it avidly. Harry did not become officially associated with it till 20 years later, when on the death of Leo Huberman, Paul invited him to take his place, though the three of them with others, Paul Baran, Stanley Moore, etc., were long time friends. Harry’s background and life made him the obvious choice.

Author of The Age of Imperialism (1969), and Imperialism: From the Colonial Age to the Present (1977), co-author with Paul Sweezy of The Dynamics of US Capitalism (1970), The End of Prosperity (1977), The Deepening Crisis of US Capitalism (1980), Stagnation and the Financial Explosion (1987), The Irreversible Crisis (1988), the pamphlet Globalisation—To What End (1993), and Imperialism Without Colonies (2003), Magdoff became widely recognised for his economic analysis of imperialism.

Harry Magdoff was born on August 21, 1913, in the Bronx, the son of working class Russian Jewish immigrants, and his father a house painter. He grew up in a New York immigrant community at a time when war and revolution were a vibrant part of their life, and common topics of conversation in the community. His first contact came when, at five years of age, he was taken to visit relatives of the Lower East Side, at the time when the first Russian Revolution, the Kerensky Revolution had taken place. In his own words, "We went by elevated train. The train was a madhouse. There were people with bottles of whiskey, drinking and singing. It was all – Down With The Tzar!" Then later, when his uncle was called up as a draftee in the First World War, he accompanied him with his mother, to the local school yard where the draftees were to report, and there witnessed the heartbreak of wives, mothers, sweethearts crying.

Everyday was bringing new experiences, grounding new consciousness into his little brain. One day in a debate in the park, he overheard that Britain "owned" India, and his shock sent him exploring the history of colonialism. In 1929, at 16, he came across a copy of A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, in a secondhand bookstore, and encountered Marx for the first time. Reading the famous preface, he was stunned. Marx’s view of history came as a revelation to him, as it did for so many others when they alighted on Marx for the first time. "I didn’t understand the rest of the book, but that got me started reading about economics. We were going into the Depression then and I wanted to figure out what it all meant."

Then came the demonstration of the unemployed in Union Square in March 1930, which proved the determining element in his emerging radicalism.

"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 spattered. I ran like hell."

By the time he joined the City College of New York, where he commenced studies of engineering, physics and mathematics, Magdoff had already read a lot of Marx. He supported himself by teaching courses on Marxism, in Yiddish, to working class men and women in Newark, Elizabeth and New Brunswick, New Jersey. In the early thirties, there was taking place a startling and sudden change, not a revolution but a transformation, a rapid growth of student political activity. And not surprisingly, that was where Magdoff’s politics grew. Imbued with a sense of humour, which helped later to see him through the hard and harsh years, he became active in a progressive student organization, the "Social Problems Club" at City College and became editor of its monthly magazine, Frontiers. The year 1932 saw him in Chicago to participate in the founding conventions of the ‘National Students League’ and the ‘Youth League Against War and Fascism’. During that trip he married his fellow New York student, Beatrice Griezer. Beadie to her friends, she had also grown up in the Bronx and had been marching on picket lines ever since she was a pre-schooler along with her pro-union mother. When they had first met some three years before, Harry and Beadie, together with other friends, would climb on to her tenement house roof, listen to classical music, and discuss art, as part of a neighbourhood group dubbed ‘Friends of Culture’. From that day, they remained together, engaged in common struggle until Beadie’s death nearly 70 years later, in 2002.

Magdoff was twice ousted from City College for his political activities – first suspended, then expelled – and went on to New York University’s School of Commerce from where he received a BS in Economics in 1936. He had not planned on university, but his mother – who had never been to school, who had taught herself to read, was highly intelligent and had an inordinate respect for education – had, over the years, squirreled away enough housekeeping money to pay for a semester at NYU.

After University, there followed in the 1930s and 1940s, a number of government jobs in various agencies in Philadephia and Washington – first a position in Philadelphia with the Works Progress Administration’s national research project, for which he conducted studies of the labour force, unemployment, industrial capacity, and productivity. A Marxist working for the government may seem a strange anomaly, on both sides, but as he was to explain later: "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, etc. 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 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?"

At the same time Magdoff was well aware that not all jobs in the government were the same. As he also pointed out, it was a capitalist, imperialist government, and 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 Nicaragua – these too were government jobs! But there were jobs in government during the New Deal where one could be more actively engaged in getting a better deal for the people.

In 1940, he moved to Washington DC, to take charge of the civilian requirements division of the National Defence Advisory Commission. After the US 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, following which, he was unemployed and 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.

The period, especially 1948 onward, was particularly severe for Harry Magdoff. With no reserves and two children, Beadie got a job, at first part-time, where teachers of the retarded were badly needed. Magdoff had little jobs, nothing certain, nothing sure, but finally landed a job, because he discovered, being politically hounded, he could be got cheap, for what felt like a princely sum, of $75 a week, as a sales promotion manager for a television company that produced programs. Next a job on Wall Street, where the boss cared little for his political views, or the possibility of being visited by the FBI, as long as he made money for him. Hating Wall Street, he was happy to be offered a more "honourable" job as an insurance broker.

While they managed to get by, it was also in this period that they met and made new and interesting friends – Leo Huberman, Paul Sweezy, Paul Baran, Stanley Moore and many others. But it was also the time of Grand Juries and lawyers, newspaper stories, and a lot of tension. The children were involved; Beadie was called down to the Board of Education. Lacking an organisation, which could have acted as some sort of support group, going to committees and the juries alone was very tough - only friends and family, who didn’t necessarily agree with their views, were supportive.

Magdoff returned to the fore as a public Marxist intellectual in 1965, with the publication of his essay in The Socialist Register 1965, edited by Ralph Miliband and John Saville, "Problems of United States Capitalism". Four years later, in May 1969, the twentieth anniversary issue of Monthly Review 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.

Once speaking of this event Magdoff recounted: "When Paul asked me to join him he said, ‘You won’t have to do anything. All you’ll have to do is to give me your judgement 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?’

From the early days of the magazine’s life, there had always been emphasis on brevity and clarity. The guideline was, Revise,.Rewrite, Make sure it is understandable.