Abstract
Michael Perelman, who died on September 21, 2020, was a deeply read, nondoctrinaire, open-minded, eminently approachable scholar, and gentleman, whose unwavering commitment to the overthrow of capitalism, grounded firmly upon a Marxist understanding of its nature and operations, informed all his work. His legacy includes several decades of classroom teaching, thesis supervision, an impressive sheaf of publications, and the early use of the internet to facilitate critical dialogue among scholars and activists via the Progressive Economists Network (PEN-L) mailing list. He was an early and active member of the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE), and published frequently in the Review of Radical Political Economics, among other scholarly journals.
Michael’s interventions were informed by a deep knowledge of economic theory, economic history, and the history of economic thought. He identified professionally as an economist, and as such was in the discipline, if very much not of it, confessing to being a “lapsed economist” (Perelman 1996: 1). Nevertheless, like many heterodox and radical political economists, he devoted considerable time and energy to understanding the orthodoxy that provides the veneer of scientific respectability to otherwise indefensible social practices and outcomes. In this connection, one might wonder just how much more he and others could have achieved in the service of the betterment of all humanity, without what amounts to a significant tax on the intellectual resources of heterodox political economy and social science more generally. Michael made a similar, more generally applicable point in his book analyzing the limits imposed on human creativity, ingenuity, and imagination by “the market” (Perelman 2000a).
Michael’s substantial published corpus spanned a broad spectrum of subjects, ranging from the theoretical to the empirical analysis of the contemporary United States via intellectual history. Uniting his scholarly and more overtly polemical interventions was a fundamental recognition and rejection of what he often described as the “perversity” of capitalism, simultaneously fascinating and appalling in its operations and generation of absurdly grotesque outcomes, and much of it via the apparent impersonality of disembodied market forces, thus rationalizing egregious inequalities and cloaking abuses of power. He captured this absurdity in his concept of the “farm worker paradox,” whereby under capitalism “the people whose work is most essential to supporting life generally earn the least income” (Perelman 2003: 13). The designation of so many underpaid and downtrodden employees as “key workers” during the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 onwards, in sudden recognition of their essential contribution to the economy’s functionality, and their swift re-consignment to normal, lowly status following the lifting of lockdown is a particularly powerful demonstration of this manifest absurdity.
Despite an apparent eclecticism, there were strong recurrent themes in Michael’s writings, stemming from a deeply rooted concern with the fate of the countryside, agriculture, and rural life more generally. This was something about which he felt particularly strongly, perhaps stemming from his rural West Pennsylvania origins but certainly given impetus by the unlikely combination of a summer spent working on a German farm and reading Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (Ding 2010: 547–48). To Michael’s considerable surprise, Tolstoy’s depiction of farm workers matched his own experience and gave him a new thirst for learning that had previously eluded him. However, the only course that appealed to him during his undergraduate years at the University of Michigan was a graduate class in the history of economic thought, taught by the institutionalist economist Daniel Fusfeld, who introduced Michael to the work of Marx, and who would later be a founding member of URPE. On his retirement in 1986, Fusfeld recommended that his replacement would be Michael.
Cutting short his graduate study in comparative literature, Michael eventually enrolled in doctoral studies at the University of California-Berkeley, choosing agricultural economics because the subject’s lack of popularity “meant that students were largely free to pursue subjects of interest to them” (Ding 2010: 548). Thus began his lifelong engagement with the study of agriculture under capitalism, and a growing frustration at what he perceived to be an unfortunate and persistent lack of interest in agriculture among radical economists (Perelman 2000b: 317). Determined to show the error of this neglect, he repeatedly revisited this subject throughout the course of his professional career.
Michael completed his doctorate in 1971, under the seemingly disinterested supervision of George Kuznets (Ding 2010: 548). Unable to accept neoclassical economics from either methodological or theoretical standpoints, Michael’s first book instead investigated the negative externalities generated by profit-oriented agriculture, anticipating much critical discourse to follow, driven as the book was by an initial focus on the outsized quantity of energy consumed by modern agricultural techniques in comparison with their edible outputs (Perelman 1977). The violence and persistence of primitive accumulation—“the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production” (Marx 1976: 875)—was at the center of his second book, Classical Political Economy: Primitive Accumulation and the Social Division of Labor (Perelman 1983). This exposed the extent to which classical political economy obscured or ignored the fundamental reality that Marx later identified: “Expropriation is the starting point of the capitalist mode of production, and even in the last instance to expropriate all individuals” (Marx 1981: 571). Analogous to John Henry’s excavation of neoclassical economics’ origins in the very deliberate and knowing efforts of the later classical economists to replace the labor theory of value (Henry 1990), Michael explained the reasons behind primitive accumulation’s almost complete absence from classical political economy’s canon. Equally absent from that canon are such authors as Sir James Steuart, who had the poor taste to acknowledge the brutal realities of the process explicitly. Michael later expanded on the themes of Classical Political Economy in a book that stands as his most significant work of scholarship, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Perelman 2000c). In addition, Michael devoted considerable energy to analyzing the capitalist development of the United States, once again updating an earlier study in order to take account of the dramatic restructurings of the 1990s and the contradictions that both drove and arose from these, amid contemporaneous paeans to the “new economy” (Perelman 1993, 2002).
Like that of his mentor Daniel Fusfeld, Michael’s work combined scientific rigor with a strong commitment to social justice. In so doing, he has left a rich legacy. Aspects of that legacy are treated in the tributes below, which we offer in honor of a comrade, mentor, and friend.
