How URPE Helped This “Tenured Radical” Thrive in a Non-radical Economics Department

1. Introduction

In the summer of 1968, I had finished my two years of course work in graduate school and looked forward to writing a dissertation and getting a job teaching economics at a college. I had entered college in the fall of 1960 with no knowledge of economics. I had attended Elisabeth Irwin High School (EI) in New York City, which was quite unique as it boasted a faculty that was friendly to left-wing ideas. I came from an old left background as did a number of my classmates. My parents were Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, and I had been adopted by Anne and Abel Meeropol whose apartment was filled with left-wing books. One of the first books I read in their home (at the age of eleven) was The Great Conspiracy: The Secret War against Soviet Russia (Sayers and Kahn 1946), a catalogue of all the attacks that the Soviet Union had experienced from the moment of its inception. ¹ As I grew into my teens, I had learned the value of keeping my mouth shut in public school. It was okay to advocate equality for African Americans and be opposed to Senator Joseph McCarthy, but one should never speak publicly in a positive way about the Soviet Union or socialist principles. That was reserved for family and close friends. When I ended up at EI (as we called it), I felt liberated. I did my junior year report on the Paris Commune and read a pamphlet by Marx about it as well as the work of Frank Jellinek. ² My social science teacher (who taught us for three years, having a most significant influence on all of us) emphasized the study of history as a search for what caused things to happen, not merely as a catalogue of what did happen. Most importantly, he did not engage in the cold war rhetoric of my public school teachers about how horrible “Red Russia” was and how dangerous “communists” were. Among the books that influenced me as a teenager were Labor’s Untold Story (Boyer and Morais 1945), published by the radical union the United Electrical and Machine Workers of America in 1955, and We the People written by the cofounder of Monthly Review, Leo Huberman. One section of the latter book that stuck with me was the discussion of how the 14th Amendment was re-interpreted by the Supreme Court to protect corporations from state government regulations (Huberman 1947: 241–3).

Thus, when I arrived at Swarthmore College in the fall of 1960 for my undergraduate education, I was imbued with most if not all of the political views of the old left. I was a pro-communist, pro-Soviet, pro-peace, pro-union, pro-integration person. The 1956 Soviet intervention into Hungary had certainly bothered me as did Khrushchev’s revelation of Stalin’s crimes. However, neither of these events had shaken my basic faith in the worldview propagated by, for example, the newspaper The National Guardian. (Although founded and run by three noncommunist leftists [Cedric Belfrage, James Aronson, and John McManus], it could honestly be identified as a fellow-traveler newspaper because it rarely disagreed publicly with the positions of the American Communist Party [Aronson and Belfrage 1978].)

At Swarthmore, I ended up majoring in economics and minoring in history. In the course of my studies, I realized that what I was studying and what I believed were in direct conflict. The complicated nature of historical events could not fit neatly into the “vulgar Marxism” I had brought from high school—the “economic interpretation of history.” I had no real answers to the “best of all possible worlds” story told in mainstream economics courses. Even a brief effort to engage in a Marxist study group, where we got through the first four chapters of Volume I of Capital and the early chapters of Paul Sweezy’s The Theory of Capitalist Development, did not give me sufficient understanding to refute the “factors of production” approach to the distribution of income. Thus, my career as a student of economics was completely cut off from my “gut” instincts. I satisfied myself that Keynesian economics had demonstrated the instability of capitalist economies and also was attracted to the “stagnation thesis” of Alvin Hansen (Hansen 1938). ³

Luckily, I spent two years getting a second BA from Cambridge University in the United Kingdom. There, I was influenced by Maurice Dobb, Joan Robinson, Geoff Harcourt, Robin Marris, Ajit Singh, Luigi Pasinetti, and Bob Rowthorn (all on the faculty) as well as fellow students, Henry Bernstein, Adrian Wood, Michael Moohr, D. Mario Nuti, John Richards, and Steven C. Rankin. ⁴ There, I became an intellectual Marxist. I satisfied myself that the Marxist approach to understanding economics and economic experience was more right than wrong, despite my still superficial understanding of what I was reading in the Marxist canon. I began to develop my personal critique of the mainstream economics I had been exposed to at Swarthmore. I also realized that what I really loved about studying economics was using history to inform economic issues. Thus, I applied to the Graduate Program in Economic History at the University of Wisconsin. This program combined both disciplines. An added attraction was that Wisconsin was the home base of the historian William Appleman Williams whose books, The Contours of American History, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy and The Great Evasion, had excited and influenced me both at Swarthmore and during my years in Cambridge. ⁵

During my first semester at Wisconsin, I took a graduate seminar on social and economic trends in underdeveloped countries cotaught by an institutionalist economist, William P. Glade. He suggested I write a paper about institutionalist and Marxist approaches to entrepreneurship. ⁶ This gave me an opportunity to read for the first time, the works of Veblen and Ayres as well as to carefully re-read Sweezy’s The Theory of Capitalist Development. Writing that paper permitted me to think through and coherently conceptualize a narrative about the dynamics of capitalist societies. It was definitely crude and underdeveloped, but it has stood me in good stead ever since, as I went through an over forty-year career teaching at the college level. ⁷

2. Encountering URPE

This brings me to 1968 when I received the first mailing to the SDS membership urging the creation of a dissident group of economists. ⁸ I was enthralled. There had been a handful of SDS pamphlets that touched on economic issues, but here were a group of like-minded people who could, to use a Thomas Kuhn expression, practice “normal science.” ⁹ I joined the organization, subscribed to the Review of Radical Political Economics (RRPE) and have been reading it and attending meetings ever since. ¹⁰

In 1970, I got a job at Western New England College (WNEC) in Springfield, Massachusetts. WNEC had just instituted an economics major. There were three people in the program, which was housed in the multidisciplinary department of History, Government, and Economics (with a Historian as chair). Our main role at the college was to teach two semesters of Principles of Economics to every sophomore in the School of Business (other majors required one semester as well). In any given semester, economics would usually offer two (three at the most) upper-level courses. The teaching load was four sections a semester (principle sections could have as many as 35 students), usually three of which were either Principles micro or Principles macro. There were no teaching assistants. For upper-level courses, I was assigned to teach American Economic History and Economic Development because of my economic history studies. I later picked up a course in Public Finance which required that I teach myself the basics having had neither an undergraduate nor a graduate course in that discipline.

The most important thing that kept me grounded, while I attempted to figure out how to be true to what I believed while also being true to the needs of my students, was the existence of a vibrant local URPE chapter located in the Amherst-Northampton area. I started attending meetings almost immediately. In the early 1970s, economists with radical inclinations were often isolated in departments that were at best indifferent and at worst actively hostile to them as “outliers” within the profession. ¹¹ In those early years that I attended the local URPE meetings, there were two attempts to get rid of radical economists—one at Smith College where two radicals, Charles Sackrey and Mark Aldrich, were denied tenure by a vote of the Economics Department and the other at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst where Michael H. Best was denied reappointment by the department. Students protested, and faculty from other institutions and other departments added their voices. The UMass decision was overturned, and at Smith, the college wide Committee on Tenure and Promotions split the difference by tenuring Mark Aldrich. By the middle of the 1970s, the Amherst-Northampton-South Hadley area in Western Massachusetts had welcomed a significant number of radical economists at UMass-Amherst, and at Smith, Mount Holyoke, and Hampshire Colleges. It should be noted that this occurred not only because of the intellectual quality of the work done by the specific radical economists hired but because of the refusal by students and supportive faculty to take the assault by those attempting to purge their departments lying down. It was the willingness to struggle that led to these victories. ¹² Although I was the only radical economist at my institution, the increased number of radicals in the Amherst area gave me the ability to interact with many like-minded people at local URPE meetings. ¹³ There were also conferences at Yale or Harvard (both short car trips from where I was living in Springfield). Local URPE meetings and these conferences provided me with intellectual sustenance.

I should also note that because John Kenneth Galbraith was the President-elect of the American Economic Association at the December 1971 meetings, he was able to influence the selection of topics for paper presentations. He asked Paul Sweezy to organize a panel of radicals, which Paul called “Some Contradictions of Capitalism.” ¹⁴ Paul invited me to be one of the discussants on a very interesting paper by Harry Cleaver on the Green Revolution. ¹⁵ It was a heady experience to participate in the panel and then to work through my thoughts on the relationship between the introduction of the new technologies associated with the Green Revolution and the presence or absence of revolutionary peasant movements. Re-reading the papers and comments reminds me that in those days, we radicals were full of optimism that with the right amount of information and analysis we could change the world. We could actually persuade people that radicalism is rational and that the irrational system—capitalism and its international aspect, imperialism—was doomed to failure before both the power of the people and the power of reason. And despite over forty years of dashed hopes (especially after what we thought were victories in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Mozambique, Angola, Chile, and Nicaragua), we still need that optimism—we still need that belief in the power of reason and struggle to conquer irrationality.

Western New England College was a teaching institution. Since I was mostly teaching Principles of Economics to Business majors, it was essential that they got a full presentation of the mainstream, no matter how critical I might be of it. Over the years, I experimented with various supplementary texts but decided that all students ought to read a mainstream text based on the original Samuelson model from decades earlier. This way, they would get the mainstream view unfiltered by my presentation. I decided that the best way to be true to my beliefs about “how the world works,” while giving students the mainstream tools to take upper division economics courses and apply traditional economic principles in their advanced courses within their disciplines, was to organize my classroom as a grand debate. The textbook would present one way of looking at the economy while I, both in class and with supplementary readings, would present a different way of looking at the economy. This seemed to work well from the start. I even published a piece about my approach in the RRPE in 1975 (M. Meeropol 1975).

In that article, I wrote that there was a silver lining in disagreeing with the textbook (and with mainstream economics in general) because the students would be forced to think for themselves. They could not parrot the textbook, nor could they merely transcribe what they had heard me say. They would have to figure out for themselves which arguments were more convincing. In doing that, no matter what conclusion they drew, they would have experienced the real value of a college education—getting the experience of really thinking for themselves. From my perspective, I was doing my job. From my radical perspective, I was making sure that the students seriously considered opinions and arguments that they would normally never be exposed to.

In 1971, I attended my first national URPE conference. It was a heady time. Nixon had just announced his “New Economic Policy” breaking with the Bretton Woods fixed-exchange rate system for international finance and imposing temporary wage and price controls. The conference hammered out an official statement from URPE, which ended up being published in the RRPE in early 1972. (It was also the conference that created the women’s caucus within URPE as our group began to come to grips with male privilege.) I presented a paper that ultimately was published in the RRPE in 1972. Although one of my Wisconsin professors praised me for “trying to make [Paul] Baran operational,” I myself was disappointed in the approach, and when it came time to write my dissertation, I left almost all of that analysis out. For me, the most important part of this conference was that Gar Alperovitz gave a paper titled, “Notes towards a Pluralist Commonwealth.” In it, Alperovitz presented his vision of how socialism might work democratically in advanced capitalist countries, avoiding the pitfalls of centralized undemocratic so-called socialism that had emerged from Stalin’s economic policies in the Soviet Union. Because I had read The Great Evasion many years before, I was already inclined to agree with the principle of decentralization. Before it succumbed to the “who is the most revolutionary Maoist” disease in 1969, SDS had practiced total decentralization. The National Office did nothing but facilitate, it left actions and opinions to each local chapter. (That is how members of the Progressive Labor Party came to dominate, for example, the Cambridge, MA chapter.) I listened to Alperovitz with great interest at the conference and read his article when it was published in the RRPE with even more interest. In fact, it became the touchstone of my foray into the realm of advocacy economics in the early 1970s. ¹⁶

At a local university, a political science professor decided it would be an interesting debate to pair a “Marxist” with a real right-winger. He contacted me as a member of URPE and self-described Marxist, and put me on the same stage with the head of the local John Birch Society to debate before a group of students and faculty. We did this two times. I used my understanding of Alperovitz’s analysis to argue that Soviet-style central planning was not the way to achieve the socialist vision. That instead, devolving economic activities to the most viable local provision and having each locality be constituents (we had not yet gotten to the jargon of “stakeholders”) of larger entities (such as a regional steel industry) would be the way to make socialism more efficient and more democratic. My presentations were not anywhere near as consistent and complete as even Alperovitz’s original formulations, but they were sufficiently nonstereotypical as a model of socialism for my Bircher opponent that he complained I was not really a Marxist but a “fuzzy” because I said some things (such as decentralized law enforcement to prevent Black communities from being occupied by white police forces) that even he could agree with. When a more mainstream Democrat started questioning him about his opposition to the pitifully inadequate American welfare state, my Bircher opponent challenged him to have a real debate about socialism versus freedom (as he saw it) rather than having to continue arguing with me. The second session was not as successful as the first, and these debates were not repeated again. Nevertheless, the experience of making a presentation outside of the classroom—a presentation informed by URPE work—was extremely important to me. Although I soon got involved in a different political struggle that had very little to do with economics, ¹⁷ the experiences debating the Bircher stood me in good stead when I began to give talks about economic issues many years later. Note, if I had not attended the URPE conference in 1971, I would not have seen Alperovitz’s presentation, and his article in the RRPE might not have had the same impact. That personal encounter created the knowledge and interest that became my gateway to political economic advocacy outside of the classroom—a first step toward a career as, what one local newspaper decades later called, a “Citizen Prof.”

Beginning in 1980, I threw myself into the study of (and resistance to) what came to be known as Reaganomics. While on sabbatical at Cambridge in the spring and summer of 1980, I had made a proposal to the editorial board of the Cambridge Journal of Economics (CJE) that there be an investigation of the rising tide of right-wing economics, symbolized in Britain by the policies of newly elected conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. This was even before Reagan was elected. My interest in the new right-wing economics had been piqued because I had read Mark Green and Norman Waitzman’s (1981) book Business War on the Law that was written in response to the efforts of economist Murray Weidenbaum to measure the costs imposed on society by regulations. Wildly exaggerating the costs, Weidenbaum estimated that by 1979, regulations cost American society $100 billion per year. ¹⁸ The assumption behind the argument was that no benefits could possibly justify such “high” costs. Green and Waitzman argued that in fact most regulations created very high levels of benefits. I sensed just from reading this book and following the struggles to pass tax cuts in the period after 1978 (that was the year that Jack Kemp first proposed dramatic tax cuts that, according to the new “supply side economics,” would pay for themselves with improved productivity and economic activity) that a new era of right-wing economics was upon us. The CJE board listened to my proposal to run a special issue on the new right-wing economics and instead decided to sponsor a conference the next summer. The conference, which occurred in June of 1981, was called New Orthodoxy in Economics and brought together economists from Britain, the United States, Australia, Canada, Italy, Belgium, and France to critique the theories of supply side economics and monetarism as well as the policies of the Pinochet government in Chile and the Thatcher regime in Britain. A number of URPE members were in the US group that attended the conference.

My interest in the study of the new right-wing economics was helped by the fact that many economists in the Amherst-Northampton area had come together in 1979 to create the Center for Popular Economics (CPE). Because I had been focused on noneconomic political activities from 1973 through 1978, and had gone on sabbatical to Britain in 1980, I had lost touch with the activities of the local URPE chapter. Thus, I only became aware of CPE with the publication in 1985 of their Economic Report of the People. Conceived as a radical alternative to the self-congratulatory Economic Report of the President (which by 1984 had begun celebrating the so-called successes of Reagan’s economic policies), this report analyzed the impact of Reagan’s first round of policy changes. The “Reagan Revolution” had begun with the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, which cut taxes on upper income taxpayers while counter-acting the miniscule income tax cuts for lower income people with scheduled increases in the Social Security payroll tax. Cuts to social programs and reduced regulation signaled a major policy shift from the postwar economic policies of Keynesian aggregate demand management, a truce in the capital-labor conflict that permitted real wages to rise for the quarter century after WWII, and a commitment to a (minimal) social safety net due to the expansion of the coverage of the New Deal Social Security Act. Instead, we had Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers to break the PATCO strike and changes in the composition of the NLRB. There was even an (aborted) attempt to cut social security spending.

In 1987, I joined CPE and participated in a number of their summer and urban institutes. This organization at its best exemplified the solidarity and cooperative spirit of the New Left. It was not a top-down organization. It showed great resiliency over decades of running programs for activists and interested individuals to share our understanding of “how the world works” from the perspective of the people affected by the workings of “the economy.” I was very proud to be an active member, even for a brief period of time and cherish my memories of being part of teams of people sharing our understanding during weeklong (and some weekend-long) programs.

3. A Support Community for Lefty Economists

Because of the existence of URPE, we radicals were very fortunate. Back in the 1950s and early ‘60s, Paul Baran was the only tenured Marxist economist teaching at a major US university (Stanford). In the collective portrait published by Monthly Review after his premature death in 1964, there is a touching excerpt from a letter he wrote to his collaborator Paul Sweezy in 1963. He laments, “It is awfully lonely here with absolutely no one to talk to and so much to talk about.” ¹⁹ He was perhaps specifically referring to putting the final touches on Monopoly Capital, ²⁰ but we can also imagine he was lamenting the pain of intellectual isolation in general. While at Stanford, he endured the indignity of having the Stanford administration assuage the angry alumni who demanded to know why such a dangerous radical was allowed to teach at their school with the excuse that he had tenure and that they had frozen his salary. A colleague attempting to cheer Baran up noted that that was the “price” for being a revolutionary—without an acknowledgment of how that very sentiment violated the concept of academic freedom. But more importantly, he did not have like-minded people to regularly bounce ideas off of. There was the Monthly Review (and a long friendship with Paul Sweezy that became a collaboration in the late 1950s), which Baran’s friend Alonso Aguilar called his “trinchera”—a word literally meaning trench (for military defense) but in this context meaning his rock, his foundation. In fact, with his book The Political Economy of Growth and his collaborative work with Sweezy, one could say that as far as macroeconomics is concerned, Baran (together with Sweezy) created the Monthly Review school of neo-Marxism extending and refining the idea first proposed by Alvin Hansen in 1938, Sweezy in 1942, and Josef Steindl in 1952, ²¹ that in the monopoly phase of capitalism, the long run tendency was toward secular stagnation and not (as some have read Marx’s Capital) in ever-dramatic economic crises and the immiseration of the working class.

We radical economists in the post-1968 period could escape from the difficulties Baran experienced at Stanford. Instead of one friend/colleague on the other side of the continent and one magazine, we had like-minded friends, colleagues, and comrades right in our own backyards—if not in the same department. We had the RRPE (and other journals like Radical America, Science and Society, and Socialist Revolution—later Socialist Review). We had regional and national conferences—we had a movement. (We even got our own panels at the American Economic Association’s annual meetings in December of 1970 [on imperialism] and 1971 when Galbraith asked Paul Sweezy to organize the panel, “Some Contradictions of Capitalism.”) We were not isolated as was Baran, and we felt the strength in numbers and re-enforcement. It was a great time to be an economist, even in the United States.