Baran, Paul

Born 1910; died 1964. American economist. Born in the Ukraine. Emigrated. Studied in Berlin and Paris.

Baran lived in the USA from 1939, continuing his education at Harvard University. After World War II, he worked in the administration of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He was a professor of economics at Stanford University (USA) from 1949. The book The Political Economy of Growth (1957) brought him his greatest fame. In this work he attempted to provide a Marxist analysis of certain problems of the economic growth of developing countries. In the book Monopoly Capital (1966), which was written in collaboration with P. Sweezy, Baran used much factual material to demonstrate the parasitism and decay of the monopolistic economy of the USA. On a number of theoretical questions—particularly, the definition of the economic features of imperialism—Baran seriously departed from the Marxist theory of imperialism. This is most clearly evident in the article Notes on the Theory of Imperialism (1964), which he wrote with Sweezy. He considered the development of the national liberation movement to be the main path of the transition of human society to socialism and underestimated the revolutionary capabilities of the proletariat in developed capitalist countries. His works are popular among students and progressive strata of the petite bourgeoisie of the USA and Latin America.