not the first act itself, was under way in the Japanese invasion of what was then called Manchuria. The Great Depression hit bottom in Western Europe and North America, giving rise to two simultaneous experiments in capitalist reform: the liberal New Deal in the United States, and the fascist, war-oriented Hitler dictatorship in Germany. The First Soviet Five-Year Plan, launched a few years earlier, suddenly began to appear to a crisis-ridden world as a beacon of hope, a possible way out for humanity afflicted with the peculiarly modern plague of poverty in the midst of plenty.
Nothing I had learned in the course of what was presumably the best education available in the United States had prepared me to expect, and still less to understand, any of these momentous developments. My state of mind as I arrived in London in the fall of 1932 was one of bewilderment and confusion edged with resentment at the irrelevance of what I had spent the last four years trying to learn. Whether I knew it or not I was a perfect candidate for conversion to new ways of thinking. And fortunately for me the situation at the London School was very favorable. The brand of economics in vogue, a sort of Austrian-Swedish mixture, was distinctive but basically a variant of the bourgeois orthodoxy I had grown up with. But there was Harold Laski in political science, a brilliant teacher who had been fired from Harvard for his role in the Boston police strike of 1919, entering the most radical phase of a colorful career and exposing a wide circle of students to a sympathetic interpretation of Marxian ideas. And above all there were the graduate students in all the social sciences, a variegated group from all over the world (the British Empire was still intact), who, unlike any students I had known in the United States, were in a continuous state of intellectual and political ferment. It was in this stimulating atmosphere, and mostly through fellow students, that I first came into contact with Marxism and what were then its major representatives in the West: left social democrats, orthodox Communists, and Trotskyists. At that stage the differences among them interested me very little; what was of enormous importance was that I soon began to see the world through different eyes. What up to then had seemed a senseless chaos of inexplicable disasters now appeared as the logical, indeed the inevitable, consequence of the normal functioning of capitalism and imperialism. And I had as little difficulty as most of my new friends in accepting the thesis that the way out of the crisis was through revolution and socialism, a course that the Russian Bolsheviks were pioneering and in which they needed all the support like-minded people in the rest of the world could give them.
I returned to the United States after my year at the London School a convinced but very ignorant Marxist. By the fall of 1933, things were already different at home from the way they had been only a year earlier. The shocking growth of unemployment to a quarter of the labor force, the collapse of the banking system, and the beginnings of New Deal reforms—not to mention developments abroad—had unleashed powerful social movements that had their reflection in intellectual and academic circles. Graduate students and younger faculty members at some of the larger universities like Harvard began to take an active interest in Marxism: discussion groups proliferated, and even a few, formal course offerings made their appearance.
It was under these circumstances that I acquired a mission in life, not all at once and self-consciously but gradually and through a practice that had a logic of its own. That mission was to do what I could to make Marxism an integral and respected part of the intellectual life of the country, or, put in other terms, to take part in establishing a serious and authentic North American brand of Marxism. (I say North American not because it is an altogether accurate characterization but because it corresponds to the practice of our friends and colleagues in Latin America who quite rightly object to the implied arrogance of any nation in the Western Hemisphere describing itself as American without qualification.)
Adopting this course involved learning and teaching, writing, and finally editing and publishing. For the remainder of the 1930s and up to 1942 I had the advantages of working in an academic environment, but that became very difficult after World War II. The upsurge of U.S. imperialism on a global scale was matched by a powerful wave of reaction internally, and for nearly two decades U.S. colleges and universities were virtually closed to Marxists and Marxism. In economics the only significant exception was the late Paul Baran, who had been granted tenure at Stanford before the witch-hunting mania known as McCarthy ism swept the country, turning its institutions of higher learning into accomplices in the suppression of radical thought. It was not until the birth of powerful new movements of protest in the 1960s—the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam war movement—that a renaissance of radical thought became possible and the colleges and universities could muster up the courage to support, at least here and there and in small ways, the ideals of academic freedom and unfettered discussion, which they had inherited from the founding fathers of the Republic and to which they had never ceased to pay lip service.
During this difficult period, Marxism, to the extent that it was tolerated at all, obviously had to live on the margins of U.S. society with no institutional base and no financial support from even the most liberal of private foundations. Recognizing this, the late Leo Huberman and I founded Monthly Review (subtitled “An Independent Socialist Magazine”) with a few thousand dollars contributed by personal friends and an initial circulation of 400 subscribers. The first issue appeared in May 1949, which means that Monthly Review is now (1981) in its thirty-third year of publication. Two years later we began publishing books under the imprint of Monthly Review Press, at first simply as a means of assuring publication for books written by well-known authors like I. F. Stone and Harvey O’Connor who, in the repressive political atmosphere of the time, were being effectively boycotted by established publishing houses. Later on we expanded MR Press beyond this original function to become what I think is now generally recognized to be the leading publisher of Marxist and radical books in the English language. The magazine also expanded not only in terms of the number of subscribers but also through the establishment of several foreign-language editions: at the present time it is published in Italian in Rome, in Spanish in Barcelona, and in Greek in Athens.
In speaking of Monthly Review I have used the word “we.” Originally that referred to Leo Huberman and myself, but in the course of time a number of other distinguished Marxist writers became closely associated with the enterprise. One was Paul Baran, whose book The Political Economy of Growth, published by MR Press in 1957, played a key role in advancing and deepening Marxist ideas on development and underdevelopment and their mutual interaction. Another was Harry Braverman, who became director of MR Press in 1967 and whose book Labor and Monopoly Capital, published by MR Press in 1974, has performed a similar role with respect to Marxist ideas on the labor process and the composition of the working class in advanced capitalist societies. And a third was Harry Magdoff, who became co-editor of Monthly Review after Leo Huberman’s death in 1968 and whose book The Age of Imperialism, published by MR Press in 1969, is widely considered to be the standard Marxist work on U.S. imperialism in the post-World War II period.
One occasionally encounters references to a Monthly Review school of Marxism. If this is interpreted to mean, as I think the term “school” often is, a body of ideas inspired and guided by one or two dominant personalities, it is definitely misleading. Each member of the group that has been closely associated with MR came to Marxism by a different route and under a different combination of influences. The topics they chose to work on and the emphases they developed grew out of their own experiences and interests. If, on the other hand, “school” is taken to mean no more than that the members of the group have cooperated harmoniously, have criticized and influenced each other’s ideas, and have produced a flow of work that is generally internally consistent and has helped to shape a tendency within the overall framework of Marxism that has appealed to and in turn been further developed by younger radical intellectuals and political activists not only in North America but also in other regions, both developed and underdeveloped, of the capitalist world—if this is what is meant by “school” then I have no objection and indeed can only hope that the implied characterization of MR’s role and performance is deserved. But there is a corollary that I would ask you to bear in mind. The fact that an MR school exists only in the rather special sense I have indicated means that it has no authoritative representatives or spokes-people. Certainly the contents of these lectures have been greatly,
