Four Letters to Paul Baran

Abstract

Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy carried on a voluminous correspondence in the 1950s and early 1960s that constitutes perhaps the foremost exchange of letters between Marxist political economists in the second half of the twentieth century, comparable in some ways to Marx and Engels's correspondence during the nineteenth century. The correspondence was a necessity of their close working relationship since Paul Sweezy was living in Larchmont, New York and editing Monthly Review while Paul Baran was living on the other side of the continent in California and teaching at Stanford University. Excerpts from a few of these letters, written by Paul Baran, were published in the March 1965 issue of MR, later published as a separate book (Paul Baran: A Collective Portrait). We are printing in full four of the letters by Paul Sweezy here. References to the "opus" have to do with their work on Monopoly Capital, which occupied the two Pauls for most of a decade, until Baran's death in 1964.—The Editors

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