Paul Baran

John E. King ()
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John E. King: La Trobe University

A chapter in Russian and Western Economic Thought, 2022, pp 389-404 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Paul Alexander Baran (1910–1964) was born in Russia, and spent the first half of his life there and in Poland and Germany before settling in the United States in 1939. As a teenager he studied economics in Moscow, probably, under Evgeny Preobrazhensky, a Left Oppositionist who was subsequently executed on Stalin’s orders. Baran learned two important lessons from Preobrazhensky. The first was that Marx’s analysis in part VII of Capital Volume I of ‘primitive accumulation’ in Britain could also be applied to the Soviet Union. The second lesson was that a new and highly contradictory stage of capitalism, which Preobrazhensky termed ‘monopolism’ or ‘monopoly capitalism’, had characteristics that distinguished it from the earlier, competitive stage that Marx had dealt with in Capital. Baran put these two propositions to good use, the first in his analysis of the problems of economic development in poor countries in his Political Economy of Growth (1957), and the second in the posthumously published Monopoly Capital (1966), co-authored with Paul Sweezy.

Keywords: Backwardness; Monopoly capital; Planning; Primitive accumulation; Surplus (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:spshcp:978-3-030-99052-7_18

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-99052-7_18

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