A Capital for the Age of Growth: Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy, and the Critique of Keynesian Civilization

Abstract

A growing focus on inequality has given renewed relevance to both Keynesian political economy and its critics on the left. Cowritten by Marxian economists Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (1966) is one of the most comprehensive—and neglected—left critiques of Keynesianism. Monopoly Capital was written through hundreds of letters exchanged between 1955–64. Though inaccessible to historians for 50 years, this correspondence has recently been made available, and reveals Baran and Sweezy to be both methodologically ecumenical and engaged in the sort of cultural analysis normally associated with the critical theorists whom Perry Anderson and others have labeled “Western Marxists.” In offering an immanent critique of Keynesianism rather than a priori rejecting it for being insufficiently Marxist, Baran and Sweezy reveal a central paradox of the Keynesian vision: that the implementation of liberal-Keynesian economic policies in times of peace is impossible without socialist politics.