Baran, Paul Alexander

BARAN, PAUL ALEXANDER (1909–1964). A leading Marxist economist, Baran was born in Nikolaev, Russia, to Jewish-Polish parents. His father was a physician. Baran attended universities in Moscow, Berlin, and Frankfurt, where he was much influenced by those associated with the Institute of Social Research or the Frankfurt School; he became lifelong friends of Herbert Marcuse and Leo Lowenthal of the Frankfurt group. Marcuse once dubbed the younger man, “my teacher.” As a youth Baran joined the German Communist Party, but later, protesting its position on fascism, shifted to the German Social Democrats. In 1939 he emigrated to the United States, and, after studying at Harvard University, he assumed positions in war-related projects, including the Office of Strategic Services and the U.S. Strategic Bombing Surveys. In 1948 he joined the Economics Department at Stanford University. Until his death, Baran was probably the only Marxist economist teaching in an American university—and he keenly felt his isolation. Moreover, in the course of the Cold War Stanford made clear its wish to dismiss Baran, which probably acerbated his existing heart condition. (He died of a heart attack.) In addition, for several years the US government denied him a passport. In 1960, however, he traveled to Cuba and wrote warmly of its revolution.

Although his writings were not voluminous—two books and a posthumous collection of essays—Baran’s influence has been far reaching. The Political Economy of Growth (1957) and Monopoly Capital (1968), with Paul M. Sweezy) are classics, widely read and translated. For countless students they have served as a nondogmatic education in Marxism, virtually inaugurating American Marxist discussions of Third World, underdevelopment and advanced, or monopoly, capitalism. In both books Baran introduced the category of economic “surplus.” For Baran the Marxist term “surplus value” insufficiently comprehended Third World dependency as well as the prodigious waste that besets monopoly capital. A rising “surplus” registered the extraneous work and productivity, measured not by rates of exploitation but by human and social needs. For more orthodox Marxists, however, “surplus” sounded too philosophical and moral—the last chapter of Monopoly Capital is called “The Irrational System.” Despite this criticism, or because of it, Baran was an original Marxist economist, perhaps without peer in the United States, whose writings ranged over underdevelopment, militarism, racism, advertising, and mental health; he was a classical Marxist who rethought the theory for the contemporary world.

The Age of Monopoly Capital: Selected Correspondence of Paul A. Baran And Paul M. Sweezy, 1949-1964. edited by Nicholas Baran and John Bellamy Foster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017).

Clecak, Peter. Radical Paradoxes: Dilemmas of the American Left, 1945-1970. New York: Harper and Row, 1973.

Foster, John Bellamy. The Theory of Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1986.

Marcuse, Herbert. “Baran’s Critique of Modern Society and of the Social Sciences,” Monthly Review, 65/10(March, 2014).

Sweezy, Paul M., and Leo Huberman, eds. Paul A. Baran: A Collective Portrait. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1965.

Turhan, Ridvan, “The Effect of Dependency Theory on Discussions of ‘Underdevelopment’ in
Turkey,” in Philosophy of Globalization, edited by Concha Roldán, Oscar Daniel Brauer, and Johannes Rohbeck. Boston : Walter de Gruyter, 2018.

Baran (Paul Alexander) Papers. Stanford University Archives. Online Archive of California. Collection Number SC1234. http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8xs5zkx/