Paul Sweezy dies at 93

Paul Marlor Sweezy was born on April 10, 1910, the youngest of three sons of Everett P. Sweezy, vice president of First National Bank of New York, and Caroline Wilson Sweezy. He earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1931 and his Ph.D. in 1937. By then he was a Marxist, having taken that step during a year at the London School of Economics.

"I became convinced," he wrote much later, "that mainstream economics of the kind I had been taught at Harvard had little to contribute toward understanding the major events and trends of the 20th century."

For Sweezy, who borrowed from Keynesian theory as well as Marxism, government planning and intervention had a role, although working people also had to intervene. Listening to their debates, Paul Samuelson, the Nobel laureate, spoke of Schumpeter as "the foxy Merlin" and Mr. Sweezy as the "young Sir Galahad" who early on "established himself as among the most promising economists of his generation."

In 1949 he became co-founder and co-editor of The Monthly Review, an independent Marxist journal published in Manhattan that he continued to edit and contribute to until well into the 1990's. The magazine still appears, although its monthly circulation has fallen to 7,000, from 12,000 at its peak in the 1970's. For the first issue, Albert Einstein contributed an article titled "Why Socialism?" and over the years the bylines included such famous radicals or Marxists as W. E. B. Du Bois, Jean-Paul Sartre, Che Guevara and Joan Robinson.

"The Monthly Review was attractive to people who were leaving the Communist Party and other sectarian groups," said John Bellamy Foster, a co-editor of the publication now. "It was and is Marxist, but did not hew to the party line or get into sectarian struggles."

That reflected Mr. Sweezy's approach in the 100 articles or so that he wrote over the years and the more than 20 books he signed as author, co-author or editor. The most famous was "Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order" (Monthly Review Press, 1966), with Paul A. Baran as co-author.

That book argued that unregulated market economies have a tendency to stagnate and to develop oligopolies in which a few companies dominate each industry and keep pushing up prices, fattening profits for the oligopolies but damping economic activity because of a lack of price competition.

Sweezy's first wife, Nancy, and his second wife, Zirel, survive, as do three children, Samuel, Lybess and Martha; two stepchildren, Jeffrey and Jennifer Dowd; seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.