Harry Magdoff

Harry Magdoff, who died on New Year's Day, aged 92, had been a co-editor of Monthly Review since 1969, a pre-eminent socialist economist and the author of a groundbreaking work, The Age of Imperialism (1969). At 15, he said, reading Marx blew his mind--and he never looked back, even when, after McCarthyite inquiries cost him his job in his field, he worked in the belly of the capitalist beast as a stockbroker, among other positions. Indeed, those sojourns strengthened his grasp of how the system that he meant to overturn worked. Peaceably, of course, for he was a nonviolent man.

Robert McChesney, a friend and colleague, offered his take on Magdoff: "For some reason I had the impression that Harry was an austere, angry radical intellectual. When John Bellamy Foster asked me to join him and Harry as co-editor of Monthly Review in 2000, I anticipated that dealing with Harry was going to be something of a pain. I found him to be one of the most gentle, unpretentious and kindest men with whom I have ever worked. Getting to know him and learn from him--and he ranks in the first tier of intellectual figures in our times--has been one of the highlights of my life. I began reading Harry Magdoff in the early 1970s, when I was still a teenager. Although his best-known work concerns the political economy of imperialism, I found his analysis of the financial sector to be original, pace-setting and convincing. In some ways Harry was like the jazz genius who by being self-educated avoided the patterns that formal training creates and was able to see and understand the economy in a fresh manner. He not only fought for a just and humane world; he embodied his politics in the manner he conducted his life."

On the Monthly Review website (www.monthlyreview.org) there is a story: A student asked Harry how he could go on hoping for socialism in America when it never came. "I don't expect anything particular," he said. "But this is the way I am. I have to believe there can be a better world."

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